Tracy Chevalier Quotes

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.

In talking about a genius, you would not say that he lies; he sees realities with different eyes from ours.

My idea being that for the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you do not have to look far away. You have to know how to see.

Remember that what you have is unique because it's your own special way of looking at the world.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

To love beauty is to see light.

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.

The few wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

My wife jokes that any time I want to take a picture of her, it has nothing to do with her - it's just because the light is really nice. She's usually right. I definitely am somebody who notices the way the light skips off the floor.

It's an interesting education to listen to cricket commentary when you're not at the game. When you're there, which is most of the time for me, it flows over you. But when you're not there, you look at it in a slightly different way. You pick up things.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.

Original details are very ordinary, except to the mind that sees extraordinariness. it's not that we need to go to the Hopi mesas to see greatness; we need to view what we already have in a different way.

The very young and the very old often saw what others could not. Or would not.

What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness.

The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

If there was only one tree like that in the world, you would think it was beautiful. But because there are so many, you just can't see how beautiful it really is.