
“Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?”
Jack Gilbert
more infosource: “Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91,” interviewed by Ted Widmer, in Issue 175 of The Paris Review, Fall/Winter 2005.
category: car, life, materialism, observation, poet, school of life, vacation, values
medium: Interview
“Once as I looked up I saw a big, pure drop of rain slip from leaf to leaf of a clematis vine. The thought occurred to me that it was just such quick, unexpected, commonplace, specific things that poets and other observers jot down in their note-books.”
Wallace Stevens
more infosource: Journal entry dated July 18, 1899, in The Letters of Wallace Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 29.
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category: leaf, nature, observation, poetry, rain, vine
medium: Journal
“I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, Look. I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, Look again, which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.”
James Baldwin
more infosource: Issue 91 of The Paris Review, 1984.
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category: art, artist, Beauford Delaney, Greenwich Village, New York City, observation, school of life, writing
medium: interview
“I think it was very, very important because always I was watching and making notes and seeing the spiders carrying eggs and then babies on their backs, and watching caterpillars turn into butterflies, and, you know, watching a little plant grow—all those things were really important for me.”
Jane Goodall
more infosource: on how important free and open-ended time spent outdoors as a child was to becoming a scientist, “Jane Goodall, Illustrated,” The New York Times, May 13, 2011.
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category: childhood, nature, observation, scientist
medium: Interview
“I have seen the poor boy when he came to a tuft of violets in the wood, kneel down on the ground, smell of them, kiss them, & depart without plucking them.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
more infosource: Jan.? 1842 entry, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 277.
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category: appreciation, flower, nature, observation, poor
medium: Journal
“But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed.”
Robert Hass
more infosource: “Meditation at Lagunitas,” in The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 715.
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category: love, memory, observation
medium: poetry
notes: quoted by Mary Karr in her Twitter feed


observation