Quotes About Observation

Our idea of the things that exist is just our idea of what we can observe.

I went to the zoo once and saw this thing they call an anteater. That was quite enough for me.

She couldn't stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn't.

The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what's going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that. And they know it - how often, under what conditions...

To those of us who survived [...], it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid.

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three.

Doc remembered how Polaroids have no negatives and the life of the prints is limited. These, he noticed, were already beginning to shift color and fade.

Before long, Maxine finds herself wandering around clicking on everything, faces, litter on the floor, labels on bottles behind the bar, after a while interested not so much in where she might get to than the texture of the search itself.

They sit there for a minute while unknown forms of life pursue recreational activities in their food.

Suppose we considered the war itself as a laboratory ?

Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity.

Slothrop, who believes that women, like Martians, have antennas men do not, keeps an eye on her.

I have look'd on Worlds far distant, their Beauty how pitiless.

He was gazing at her ass in a kind of morose fatality.

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light

Out of air so blue you can take it between your fingers, rug, and bring them back blue, they watch the dot slowly grow into a rusty old reconnaissance plane.

he reached out and took her hand, overcome by a shocking tenderness. For a moment he was struck dumb at a habit of hers he saw now for the first time, how whenever she looked up from whatever she was doing, even unwrapping a sandwich in the front seat of a car, she always looked up smiling. He wondered if anybody had ever noticed it before.

Moreover, even in the absence of accumulating personal experience, it was difficult to believe that soaring murder statistics reflected simply better record keeping, since it had always been hard to ignore a dead body.

the Britons that Julius Caesar saw were to him primitive exotics with long hair, dyed bodies, and living in a society of shared wives.

She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn't listen, at sitting in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round her.

E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea.

Miss Brill had often noticed there was something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old,and from the way stared they looked as though they'd just come from dark little rooms of even, even cupboards!

When she is not serving she sits on a stool with her face turned, always, to the window. Her dark-ringed eyes search among and follow after the people passing, but not as if she was looking for somebody. Perhaps, fifteen years ago, she was; but now the pose has become a habit. You can tell from her air of fatigue and hopelessness that she must have given them up for the last ten years, at least.…

THEY knew how frightened she was; THEY saw how she turned her head away as she passed the mirror. What Linda always felt was that THEY wanted something of her, and she knew that if she gave herself up and was quiet, more than quiet, silent, motionless, something would really happen.