Quotes About Observation

This was an artist's stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions.

What isn't there is as important as what is, Phil always said.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.

Similar to the telescope or the telephone, television enables us to see or hear things we never dreamed of. When you look at the details, a concrete scene between people is really something incredibly unlikely, something subtle that requires extended description.

We are told that the first part of the process is to select the very smallest seeds from the smallest plants, which is not at all unlikely, but I cannot speak to the fact from my own observation.

I don't go out of my way to be friendly, because it's completely unnecessary. People tell you what they are going to tell you no matter what.

After your career, you go to matches, and you see so many unnecessary goals because a person is just looking where the ball is and not his opponent. Well, a ball alone has never scored a goal.

I look at the way that my kids interact with technology, and it becomes a mirror to the ways in which I myself interact with technology. I can see the ways in which that addiction and compulsion starts to settle in on them, and it's much more unnerving to see it in them than it is to experience it myself.

I try to go unnoticed. I don't watch the news or read what they say. I try to stay on the sidelines.

As a boy I believed I could make myself invisible. I'm not sure that I ever could, but I certainly had the ability to pass unnoticed.

Everyone has been in a social situation where you say something and it goes unnoticed, then someone else says the same thing and everyone laughs a lot. You learn how to be more creative and whacky and amusing.

Even as an empiricist, I have to say that I believe in luck. I've seen it too many times in politics to let it pass by unnoticed.

'Crazy Rich Asians' may be fiction, but given the situation I grew up in, I've had an unparalleled view into the very real world it depicts.

If you put yourself in a situation of unpredictability and then find that it's completely possible to accept it, then you become an observer.

You look at a herd of cattle and well, they all look the same... but they know. They all have an individual personality, and those personalities change from day to day. They can have their grumpy days and their happy days and their serene days. But it's unpredictable. You can't be off in outer space when you're dealing with animals.

In America, you watch TV and think that's totally unreal, then you step outside and it's just the same.

I watched some shows like 'The Simple Life' and 'The Anna Nicole Smith Show,' but I hadn't really watched 'The Bachelor' until I was cast on 'UnReal.'

Telescopes and microscopes bring to our view the otherwise unseen and unknown.

Some men spend their lives watching bees and ants, noting down the habits of these insects; my pleasure is to watch the human mind, noting how unselfish instincts rise to the surface and sink back again, making way for selfish instincts, each equally necessary, for the world would perish were it to become entirely selfish or entirely unselfish.

High-energy collisions have led to the observation of many hundreds of new hadronic particle states. These new particles, which are generally unstable, appear to be just as fundamental as the neutron and the proton.

Find somebody who has been successful, and learn how to do it. Find somebody who has been unsuccessful, and learn how not to do it. The clues are there. Find 'em.

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.