Quotes About Observation

I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see.

And now I'm back outside again sitting in the white plastic chair looking at the dew on the gas cap of my car. A fly wants to bit me on the ankle. The mosquitoes are all asleep. They're just not out at this hour. Only one biting fly. And a mourning dove, who blows through his thumbs to make that sound.

The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

Ava was obviously observant, an enthusiast of spring: she'd seen the white frog and the two baby flies killed by the bus driver. And she was a better reader and speller than the others. I told her she could get a book to read, but she didn't want to do that, either. Instead, she got out her poetry notebook. Poor thing: she was already fed up with being asked to do inane worksheets and she was only in kindergarten. Twelve more years to go.

The quantum world is as objective as our own: different people taking the same viewpoint see the same thing, but the quantum world is not made of objects (different viewpoints do not add up). The quantum world is objective but objectless.

During the season, fans tend to observe, in as many complicated ways and with as much detail as we can come up with, only that a winning team is very good, and a losing team is hopeless. My mother or Prince Charles or probably a Martian could make the same observation, but their views would be discounted on the grounds of ignorance.

Is that thing actually going round? I can't tell

Kids must spend half their lives throwing things at the ducks in Regent's Park. How come he managed to pick a duck that pathetic?

I watched a lot of drunk players, too, I learned from the autobiographies published after they had retired.

It was funny how you could still know little things about people, like where they kept their tin, even though you didn't know what they were thinking from one week to the next.

Sometimes you can see car crashes from a long way off, if the road is straight and both vehicles are heading towards each other in the same lane.

Barbara began to imagine the pretty girls working in Derry and Toms as beautiful tropical fish in a tank, swimming up and down, up and down, in serene disappointment, with nowhere to go and nothing to see that they hadn't seen a million times before.

I'm a writer. Life is supposed to pass me by, while I watch it.

That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.

The other dancers were embarrassed themselves, which meant that they weren't actually embarrassing; they weren't doing much more than tapping their feet, and the only way you could tell they were dancing at all was that they were facing each other but not looking at each other and not talking.

En general, los hombres juzgan más por los ojos que por la inteligencia, pues todos pueden ver, pero pocos comprenden lo que ven.

No one but her uncle knew that under Fursey's tutelage she could make her letters or that she understood Latin if it was spoken slowly—and even he seemed content to let her learn privately. Until she knew how these newcomers thought and what they wanted, she would keep it that way, keep her dice rattling in her cup. It was foolish to throw before all bets were on the table.

Os homens em geral julgam mais pelos olhos que pelas mãos, porque o ver toca a todos, sentir toca a poucos: todos vêem aquilo que tu pareces, poucos sentem aquilo que tu és

Someone's writing down your mistakes, someone's documenting your downfall.

Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.

Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory.

Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow.

Put even a fool in front of the window and you'll get a Spinoza; in the end life makes window watchers of us all

All these years Litvinoff had imagined he was so much like his friend. He'd prided himself on what he considered their similarities. But the truth was that he was no more like the man fighting a fever in bed ten feet away than he was like the cat that had just slunk off: they were different species.