Quotes About Observation

Before you measure the years, you measure the days. And before the days, you measure the moon.

You cannot talk when you first arrive. It helps you to listen.

The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves.

Look. It's one of the shortest sentences in the English language. But we don't really look, Chika. Not as adults. We look over. We glance. We move on. You looked. Your eyes flickered with curiosity. You caught fireflies and asked if they had batteries. You unearthed a penny and asked if it was treasure. And without prompting, you knew discovery should be shared.

I was stunned at how easily things went on without me

They say a child's eyes are fully formed around age three, and that is why they appear so large on the face. Or maybe those years are just so full of wonder, the child can't help it.

When my mother entered, wearing her nurse's outfit, her arms full of magazines, we must have said, "Hi Mom" too quickly, because she immediately became suspicious. You can see that in your mother's face right away, that "What did you kids do?" look.

Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.

Learning to pay attention? How important could that be? I now know it is more important than almost everything they taught us in college.

Look. It's one of the shortest sentences in the English language. But we don't really look, Chika. Not as adults. We look over. We glance. We move on.

Then, after showing the pill and some graphics, those same people appeared again, looking happier. The Reb and I watched in silence. After it ended, he asked, Do you think those pills work? Not like that, I said. No, he agreed. Not like that.

It is said that the earliest spark for the telephone came when Alexander Bell was still in his teens. He noticed how, if he sang a certain note near an open piano, the string of that note would vibrate, as if singing back to him. He sang an A; the A string shook. The idea of connecting voices through a wire was born.

Bug just because I was quiet didn't man I had n opinions. In my head I always had a witty retort.

I'm not very good at knowing what other people are thinking, but I do know that you can see tragedy, real tragedy, sitting just inside a person's gaze. You can almost always see where a person has been if you look hard enough.

I noticed that in Tokyo people didn't smell. It was funny. I couldn't smell them, and they didn't say very much: the trains were packed but it was quite silent, like being jammed into a carriage with a thousand shop-window mannequins.

Mumtaz has six moles. Two are black: behind her ear and on her hip, in the trough of the wave that crests at her pelvis. Three are the color of rust: knuckle, corner of jaw, behind knee. And one is red, fiery, at the base of her spine, where a tail might grow. I touch them and know them because I watch her like a man in a field stares up at the stars, and I love her constellation because it contains her story and our story, and I wonder which mole is the beginning and which is the end.

Children are excellent judges of character, you know

If one had asked Manucci during his days as a street urchin, as he sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah, Manucci would probably have said that ACs were hot. The first time he saw one jutting out into the street from the wall of a shop in the old city, he walked up to the noisy box and was amazed at the blast of hot air it sent straight into his face. Why do people turn on hot air in the middle of summer? he often wondered.

I like its eyes: two black dots, nonreflective light-trappers. Utterly determined eyes, doubt-free, unselfconscious. Frightening eyes if they happen to be looking at you and you're small enough to be dinner. The same eyes a man probably sees on an alligator before it drags him down and shakes the air out of his lungs and leaves him to rot a little in the murk, to be tenderized properly before he becomes a meal.

One function of the income gap is that the people at the top of the heap have a hard time even seeing those at the bottom. They practically need a telescope.

He came as a man of science, to observe a rare specimen: unhappiness greater than his own.

Our eyes all have the same mechanism, yet each of us sees so differently.

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.

magpies, jays, sparrowhawks, kestrels, all