Debra Granik Quotes

Don't let your eyes refuse to seeDon't let your ears refuse to hear

I've tried to be open to what's going on and paying close attention, not letting things that inspire me to pass me by.

When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.

I have this awareness that the more dynamic the situation is, the more on guard I need to be that the dynamic isn't controlling the situation. I found that myself in the Galapagos. For the first time in my life I was around very exotic animals, colorful, beautiful, and immediately present, all around. Birds, turtles, iguanas, seals. I was being seduced by their exoticism, I was taking pictures.The pictures weren't well lit, there was no moment in play, there was no depth to the pictures. I was just gawking with my camera at something I'd never seen before.

With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her.

We are all too much inclined, I think, to walk through life with our eyes shut. There are things all round us and right at our very feet that we have never seen, because we have never really looked.

To the man whose senses are alive and alert there is not even the need to stir from one's threshold.

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

I have learned how to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present, because that is where I am destined to live.

We never see a tree except through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Look at a tree and you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it completely, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it.

Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.

All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.

Watchfulness is experiencing a sudden glimpse of something without any qualifications - just the sudden glimpse itself.

I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind... Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky, and everything that moves, but you haven't really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: He sees too clearly and too much.

I think everything is happening all the time, but if you don't put yourself in the path of it, you miss it.

While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.

Photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you'd never paid attention to.

Anytime that I have an impulse to pull out my phone and take a picture, especially of a landscape or something, if the first thing I do is reach for the phone, I actually force myself to sit there and at least wait thirty seconds before I actually grab my phone. I'm, like, "No, sit here for thirty seconds, and just see what you think about. What does this make you think about?"

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

Rene Char wrote somewhere, apropos poetry, that there are those who create and those who discover; they are too completely different worlds. Photograph also has two sides to it and thank goodness, I am only intersted in those who discover; I feel a certain solidarity with those who set out in a spirit of discovery; I think there is much more risk invovled in this than in trying to create images; and in the end, reality is more important.

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered that I didn't need to. If the thing is true, why there it is.

“How ever did you see that?” “Because I looked for it.”

If y'can't see with yore own two eyes what's in front of them, then y'better off closin' 'em an' goin' t'sleep, 'tis far more restful! —Gerul

I go too fast to see much, only the tops of everything. I've got to prowl slow some time through this country.