Quotes About Observation

Then one day I was looking out the window. Maybe I was contemplating the sky. Put even a fool in front of the window and you'll get a Spinoza.

Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, ho many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all.

One day I saw it: how she looked back at the man that j the business suit who stood across a subway car from her, burning a hole through her with his eyes. Her stare was a challenge.

She was one of a group of girls he'd observed bloom from scraggly weeds into tropical beauties who churned the air around them into a dense humidity.

One knows a little too much about everybody. And we can even see through some men, and yet we can by no means pass through them.

Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd: I am always about in the Quad.     And that's why the tree     Will continue to be, Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.

One may feel a sudden wave of sadness and rake his brain for an explanation when he might have noticed that it was caused by a cloud cutting off the rays of the sun.

Deficient observation is merely a form of ignorance and responsible for the many morbid notions and foolish ideas prevailing.

The by far greater number of human beings are never aware of what is passing around and within them, and millions fall victims of disease and die prematurely just on this account.

Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.

Zorba sees everything everyday as if for the first time.

The watched watching the watcher.

supper. While he ate he watched his neighbors watching him.

The body breathes by itself. The mind thinks by itself. Awareness simply observes the process without getting lost in the content.

This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars—they would think the country has gone insane.

Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.

I'll have what she's having

Everything is copy.

Helen is one of those people who never say anything, not because she's shy but because she's learned—in a way I always mean to—that if you don't say anything, you make people far more nervous and self-conscious and careful around you than if you do. People like me, we just rush into the vacuum of silence people like Helen float around in; we blather and dither and yakyakyak, and people like Helen just sit there and smile into the wind.

Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I'll show you a real asshole.

As a longtime journalist, this quote from the delicious Nora Ephron made me smile in recognition of its truth: Working as a journalist is exactly like being the wallflower at the orgy...everyone else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes.

Jonathan never takes anything personally; he always sees himself as a statistical reflection of a larger trend in society.

I was a journalist and I liked to watch. I was in awe.

If I go see a play or a movie for a second time, it's as if I didn't see it at all the first time, even if the first time was just recently. I have no idea who anyone in People magazine is.