Quotes about Observation

The more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.

The dead don't die. They look on and help.

Had you noticed them before? he asked. No, never before, she replied. And now you will always see them, he said.

He crouched down, and carefully put his finger through the thorns into the round door of the nest. It's almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird, he said... After that, Miriam came to see it everyday. It seemed so close to her. Again, going down the hedge side with the girl, he noticed the celandines, scalloped slashes of gold, on the side of the ditch. I like them, he said, when their petals go flat back with the sunshine. They seem to be pressing themselves at the sun.

Still he was ambitious. He had taken to writing stories; curious, very personal stories about people he had known. Clever, rather spiteful, and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. The observation was extraordinary and peculiar. But there was no touch, no actual contact. It was as if the whole thing took place in a vacuum. And since the field of life is largely an artificially-lighted stage today, the stories were curiously true to modern life, to the modern psychology, that is.

Since that time the boy used to look at the man every time he came through, with the same curious criticism, glancing away before he met the smith's eye. It made Dawes furious. They hated each other in silence.

The chief trait of any given poet is always the spirit he brings to the observation of Humanity and Nature—the mood out of which he contemplates his subjects.

is that the President? Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep

You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.

See it?" ... "Yeah." ... "How in the world did you see that in the first place?" "Don't know." "It's hard to make out." "Give it about ten minutes..." So we waited. Trying not to look at it so much that it lost all meaning. Like a word you say over and over until you're only hearing what it sounds like and you've forgotten what it means.

In school, I sat in the back, seldom raising my hand and never raising my voice. But the absence of verbal expression did not mean I was dull to the needs of others. Didn't mean I couldn't think and feel. Didn't absorb. I thought and felt just fine. Absorbed like a sponge. My peripheral vision was twenty-ten. I cried when strangers hurt. Laughed when others smiled.

"Mystery" referred to realities behind the appearances that one could observe by means of the senses. That is to say, though our hands, eyes, ears, nose, and tongue are able to access reality, they cannot fully grasp this reality. They cannot comprehend it.