Arundhati Roy Quotes

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

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'm trying to do what I have never done - give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and at the same time nothing.

When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

Light knows when you're looking at it.

It's amazing what you don't see, though. Even when it's right in front of your eyes.

The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.

The price of seeing is silence.

I discover vision, not as a 'thinking about seeing,' to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

Awareness is that state of mind which takes in everything-the crows flying across the sky, the flowers on the trees, the people sitting in front, the colors they are wearing - being extensively aware, which needs watching, observing, taking in the shape of the leaf, the shape of the trunk, the shape of the head of another, what he is doing.

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

Everything I see is something I haven't memorized.

The more I see, the less I know.

We animate what we can see, and we see only what we animate.

The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.

who is invisible enough to see you

A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe.

Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.

The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.

The whole life lies in the verb seeing.

The finest act of seeing is necessarily always the act of not seeing something else.

Knowledge is the barrier to knowing. When knowledge is dropped, knowing flowers.