Quotes about Observation

If you're going to create a character, the tools you use to make that character 'real' are the lives you see around you. The people you listen to on the street. The emotions you see on faces and bodies while you're sitting... in a Starbucks, watching the world go by.

Time is a measure of space, just as a range-finder is a measure of space, but measuring locks us into the place we measure.

I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.

During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

Rafe hadn't been around women much, but since he'd gotten married to one of the little critters, he'd noticed they seemed to have to say out loud every thought in their head. Including stuff everybody already knew. It'd snowed. Today it was real nice. It was called weather. What was there to talk about?

The strip of earthy, faintly visible outside the window, was running faster now, blending into a gray stream. Through the dry phrases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.

He sat looking at her. She waited to see the derisive smile, but it did not come. The smile seemed implicit in the room itself, in her standing there, halfway across that room.

If a ray of light falls into a pigsty, it is the ray that shows us the muck and it is the ray that is offensive.

The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction.

The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning.

There were no traces of human existence around them. Old ruts, overgrown with grass, made human presence seem more distant, adding the distance of years to the distance of miles. A haze of twilight remained over the ground, but in the breaks between the tree trunks there were leaves that hung in patches of shining green and seemed to light the forest. The leaves hung still. They walked, alone to move through a motionless world. She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time.