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Observation Quotes
"I give her my best smile. Before the alien Armageddon happened, I was known for my smile. Not bragging too much, but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove. It had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic. But it has absolutely no effect on Ringer. She doesn't squint in its overwhelming luminescence. She doesn't even blink."
2
"Arcadio had seen her many times working in her parents' small food store but he had never taken a good look at her because she had that rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment."
2
"In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain."
2
"Some people just don't have what it takes to appreciate a cookie."
2
"Human skin hisses like a rattlesnake when it burns."
2
"His lips made a grim twist that was like the joyless cousin of a smile."
2
"Women. They are a complete mystery."
2
"I tried to bring up boyfriends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done--whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was."
2
"The tedious never die, that's what makes them tedious."
2
"And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice."And when you do find one, observe with care, he said to the intern:"they almost always have crystals in their heart."
2
"Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes, perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness."
2
"She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from story to story was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea. Another noticeable circumstance in Mrs. Sparsit was, that she was never hurried. She would shoot with consummate velocity from the roof to the hall, yet would be in full possession of her breath and dignity on the moment of her arrival there. Neither was she ever seen by human vision to go at a great pace."
2
"On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence."
2
"He'd had the foresight to know that a lot of the savages wear store-bought clothes."
2
"The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I just sit there and observe silently, not seen: that is important, that I as a watcher of all that happens should be at my place."
2
"The thirty-plus years of marriage between the ceiling and the cement plaster showed signs of weakness by frequently developing cracks and holes."
2
"Stains are even worse when you're the only one who can see them."
2
"Taking a deep breath, I shake my head and find Judge staring at me. "Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans," I say. "Once you leave the litter, you sever contact with your mothers."
2
"People in a hurry cannot think cannot grow nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility."
2
"Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture - still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish."
2
"It was clearly a prisoner's craftwork; that is, the most painstaking work in the world, for prisoners have nowhere to hurry to."
2
"He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself."
2
"In fact it was altogether an odd dog, of uncertain breed, or breeds. It was large and black, but its hair was tufty, its body scrawny and clumsy, and its manner edgy, anxious, verging on the completely neurotic. Whenever it came to a halt for a moment or so, the business of starting up again often seemed to cause it trouble, as if it had difficulty in remembering where it had left each of its legs."
2
"Ember was watching me, green bright eyes in the shadows of the room. She crouched against the wall with her wings pressed close and her tail curled around herself. Even with her fangs slightly bared and her sides heaving with fear, she was still beautiful, elegant, fiery, everything my dragon wanted."
2
"When I heard the learn'd astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."
2
"The irony of life is that those who wear masks often tell us more truths than those with open faces."
2
"He has a wide gait and I struggle to appear casual as I attempt to match his stride. His shirt's back on, which is a sin. He could definitely give Echo's guy a run for his money in the abs department."
2
"I frequently observe that one pretty face would be followed by five and thirty frights."
2
"She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea."
2
"He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself."
1
"Most people spend less time outside than prisoners."
1
"Patrick actually used to be popular before Sam bought him some good music."
1
"How do you feel?He rubbed his stomach. "Like I've been eating Styrofoam."
1
"I'm almost afraid to tell you. Let's put it this way: clean toilets are the least of your problems in this country."
1
"Nick's eyes widened as a total state of befuddled huh possessed him. Was he in theTwilight Zone?"
1
"He hated this feeling of free-floating, just drifting from place to place, thought to thought, without any sense of anchor or root."
1
"For the night Shows stars and women in a better light."
1
"The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up-flaked up, with rose-water snow."
1
"While humans play God, dogs learn from their masters."
1
"Dickens writes that one of his characters, "listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he understood his business."
1
"He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves."
"The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person."
"I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too."
"Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the details, the better the flavour seems to be."
"Good God. Men everywhere."
"No writer has an imaginative power richer than what the streets offer."
"The bowl is warmer than the soup."
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