Quotes About Observation

Being simply illustrations, of how each of us reads, becomes engaged in and watches what is being read all at the same time.

Nobody ever sees a cook eat anything.

Only one mirror has not been covered with chalky paint and that one the man ignores. He does not want to see himself stalking females or their liquid.

Lolling on the narrow pier, surrounded by these mocha-colored youths, I became aware of my own pallid body in an unaccustomed way. "Like cats," George Biddle, an American painter, wrote of islanders in the 1920s, "they fall naturally into harmonious poses.

Those who got the twentieth century right, whether in anticipation [..] or as contemporary observations, had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent.

I have always admired most those who lead with their eyes, like Mary Anning, for they seem more aware of the world and its workings.

When I left the room, Maria Thins was still standing in front of the painting.

It seemed to me that the baker had an honest response to the painting. Van Ruijven tried too hard when he looked at paintings, with his honeyed words and studied expressions. He was too aware of having an audience to perform for, whereas the baker merely said what he thought.

Although we kept the door ajar so that we could hear, we could not see beyond the gentlemen standing in front of the door in the crowded room. I felt trapped behind a wall of men that separated me from the main event.

I liked sleeping in the attic. There was no Crucifixion scene hanging at the foot of the bed to trouble me. There were no paintings at all, but the clean scent of linseed oil and the musk of the earth pigments. I liked my view of the New Church, and the quiet. No one came up except him. The girls did not visit me as they sometimes had in the cellar, or secretly search through my things. i felt alone there, perched high above the noisy household, able to see it from a distance.

in the cartoon of Sight. It

Women always studied other women, and did so far more critically than men ever did. Men didn't notice the run in their stocking, the lipstick on their teeth, the dated, outgrown haircut, the skirt that pulled unflattering across the hips, the paste earrings that were a touch too gaudy. Violet registered every flaw and knew every flaw that was being noted about her.

Mein ganzes Leben war ich diese Straßen langgegangen, aber nie war mir so sehr aufgefallen, dass ich dabei meinem Zuhause den Rücken zukehrte. Doch als ich das Ende der Straße erreichte und außer Sichtweise meiner Familie abbog, fiel es mir leichter, ruhig auszuschreiten und mich umzusehen.'' 19

in the clear brown were little flecks of black like pieces of bark

He could not tell all of the California pines apart, the gray pine from the coulter, the bushop from the knobcone and the Monterey.

I have long noted that people tend to lead with one particular feature, a part of the face or body, my brother John, for instance, leads with his eyebrows, it is not just that they form prominent tufts above his eyes, but they are the part of his face that moves the most, tracing the course of his thoughts as his brow furrows and clears.

Never trust a man who bites the heads off chickens is probably a good sound rule of practice.

Jane read her Anatomy, occasionally raising her eyes from a diagram to consider any human within sight in a dissecting sort of way which, Dot said, gave her the willies.

They are not aesthetic like a puppy or a kitten. In fact, they always look drunk to me. Look at that one—you'd swear he had been hitting the gin.

En el comedor se hizo un silencio sepulcral—susurró Xemerius desde la araña—. Todas las miradas apuntaban a la muchacha de la blusa amarillo pipí...

We were passing suits of armor at irregular intervals, and as usual, I had an uncomfortable feeling that I was under observation. "There's someone inside that armor, isn't there?" I whispered to Mr. George. "Some poor novice who can't go to the toilet all day, right? I can tell he's staring at us.

So I counted

When one spends a great deal of the formative and imaginative period of his life alone in the woods, the ability to note and track detail becomes highly developed. He becomes attuned to the subtlest changes in his surroundings, and it's easy to imagine that there might be hidden, immaterial processes beneath the surface.

With every dog I trained or handled, and there were hundreds each year, I practiced the skill of not projecting a thought, intention, or expectation onto anything the dog might do. This allowed me to bypass thinking and let the dog's actions show me what was the immediate-moment energetic equation in what was happening before me.