Quotes About Observation

You humans are so good at ignoring things. You are almost blind and almost deaf. You look at a tree and see…just a tree, a stiff weed. You don't see its history, feel the pumping of the sap, hear every insect in the bark, sense the chemistry of the leaves, notice the hundred shades of green, the tiny movements to follow the sun, the subtle growth of wood...

Where do you get your fantastic ideas from? You steal them. You steal them from reality. It outstrips fantasy most the time.

all men are writers, journalists scribbling within their skulls the narrative of what they see and hear[...]

Same with gorillas. Whoops, they say, sky gone all red, stars crashing to ground, what they putting in the bananas these days?

If you thought hard enough, he'd always considered, you could work out everything. The wind, for example. It had always puzzled him until the day he'd realized that it was caused by all the trees waving about.

MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF.

But I thought she thought he was just a big pile of jobbies?" he said. "I seen her oout walkin', an' when he comes ridin' past, she sticks her nose in th' air and looks the other wa'. In fact, sometimes I seen her wait aroound a full five-and-twenty minutes for him tae come past, just so's she can do that.

It was the kind of storm that suggests the whole sky has swallowed a diuretic.

Listen very carefully... listen to everyone and don't say much and think about what they say and how they say it and watch their eyes... it becomes like a big jigsaw, but you're the only one who can see all the pieces. You'll know what they want you to know, and what they don't want you to know, and even what they think no one knows.

That's old Twoflower, Rincewind thought. It's not that he doesn't appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. He just looks at things, but nothing he looks at is ever the same again. Including me, I suspect.

Magia jednak ma w zwyczaju czeka? w ukryciu, niby grabie le??ce w trawie.

He was doing journalism in order to eat, which is a very good way of learning journalism. Probably the only real way, come to think of it.

It's a well-known fact. It's well known at the organic level, like a lot of other well-known facts which overrule the observations of the senses. This is because if people went around noticing everything that was going on all the time, no one would ever get anything done.*

In Shadwell's simple world, anyone in sunglasses who wasn't actually on a beach was probably a criminal.

REALITY IS NOT ALWAYS WHAT IT SEEMS, said Death. ANYWAY, IF THEY DON'T WANT TO SEE ME, THEY CERTAINLY DON'T WANT TO SEE YOU. THESE ARE ARISTOCRATS, BOY. THEY'RE GOOD AT NOT SEEING THINGS. WHY IS THERE A CHERRY ON A STICK IN THIS DRINK?

They were probably descended from people who learned that if you look too hard at anyone on horseback you receive a sharp stinging sensation such as might be obtained by a stick around the ear. Not looking up at people on horseback had become hereditary. People who stared at people on horseback in what was considered to be a funny way never survived long enough to breed.

Granny Aching had never been at home with words. She collected silence like other people collected string. But she had a way of saying nothing that said it all.

The babies looked similar, both being small, blotchy, and looking sort of, though not really, like Winston Churchill.

Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes.

There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises.

When one of us says, "Look, there's nothing out there," what we are really saying is, "I cannot see.

My grandmother simply shook her head and said, You know what you saw. The bird doesn't need to be counted, and neither do you.

To see the yellow fritillaries burst forth after the deep snows of winter and know that the bears are soon to follow is to be attentive to wild nature's seasonal fugue of infinite composition and succession. The great gray owl sitting on a snag near Sawmill Ponds is not simply a bird but a heightened intelligence with golden eyes behind a mask of feathers.

When one of us says, 'Look there's nothing out there,' what we are really saying is, 'I cannot see.