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Observation Quotes
"I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too."
16
"The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires."
16
"Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?"
16
"We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identicalstructures."
16
"How do you feel?He rubbed his stomach. "Like I've been eating Styrofoam."
16
"A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at."
16
"Quiet people always know more than they seem. Although very normal, their inner world is by default fronted mysterious and therefore assumed weird. Never underestimate the social awareness and sense of reality in a quiet person; they are some of the most observant, absorbent persons of all."
16
"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."
16
"His heavy-lidded gaze reflected a languor that had nothing to do with having just awakened, and there was no doubt what was on his mind. But this is no safe cherry picker, Gwen thought, growing more concerned by the moment.This man looks like a cherry tree chopper-downer."
16
"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."
16
"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."
16
"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."
16
"I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come."
16
"He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself."
16
"Irritability was an occupational disease. Intolerant and intolerable belong in the same category."
16
"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."
16
"One must always proceed with method. I made an error of judgment asking you that question. Toeach man his own knowledge. You could tell me the details of the patient's physical appearance- nothing there would escape you. If I wanted information about the papers on the desk, Mr. Raymond would have noticed anything there was to see. To find out about the fire, I must ask the man whose business is to observe such things. - Detective Hercule Poirot to Doctor Sheppard."
16
"I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it."
15
"I like to go to Starbucks and watch the intellectuals. I observe them and their intellectualness. They in turn observe me drinking coffee and being a creeper."
15
"Patrick actually used to be popular before Sam bought him some good music."
15
"Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It's so much like home, and then it holds out on you."
15
"Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed my mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in upper rows."
15
"It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time."
15
"Human skin hisses like a rattlesnake when it burns."
15
"His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. George Bernard Shaw."
15
"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."
15
"The thirty-plus years of marriage between the ceiling and the cement plaster showed signs of weakness by frequently developing cracks and holes."
15
"Generally, there is a lot of truth value in stepping back, observing, then logically generalizing the extremes of what you see."
15
"She's Prim's size in diameter."
15
"Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful."
15
"When you see a married couple coming down the street the one who is two or three steps ahead is the one who's mad."
15
"He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves."
14
"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."
14
"It's strange to see people you don't know well in the morning, with sleepy eyes and pillow creases in their cheeks."
14
"I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime."
14
"An idiot child screaming in a hospital. (on George Bernard Shaw)"
14
"By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it."
14
"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."
14
"Some people just don't have what it takes to appreciate a cookie."
14
"At a time when she was engaged to Stilton Cheesewright, I remember recording in the archives that she was tall and willowy with a terrific profile and luxuriant platinum blond-hair, the sort of girl who might, as far as looks were concerned, have been the star unit of the harem of one of the better-class sultans."
14
"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."
14
"I confess I do not know why, but looking at the stars always makes me dream."
14
"The irony of life is that those who wear masks often tell us more truths than those with open faces."
14
"You don't know me, dude," he says, not smiling this time. Gonzo examines his cards, prepping for his next move. "People always think that they know other people, but they don't. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won't eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don't know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel ****ed up for no reason at all."
13
"A man can see by starlight, if he takes the time."
13
"If he's not he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets."
13
"Dark alleys, like social networks, are romantic, because you never know what might happen while I perform there every Caturday night. Cats do know, but won't tell. So don't even ask."
13
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