On eyes and looking

… twelve interesting quotations

Your eyes. It’s a day’s work just looking into them.

Laurie Anderson . 1947- . American performance artist and musician .  It tango

I am a visual man. I watch, watch, watch. I understand things through my eyes.

Henri Cartier-Bresson . 1908-2004 . French photographer . quoted, Life

There was a time
when the light from my eyes
was so powerful
it would blind the sun
now look
no light
nothing.

Joseph Chaikin . 1935-2003 . American theatre director, playwright and pedagogue . The war in heaven

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

Raymond Chandler . 1888-1959 . American author . The high window

The thing that makes you know that Vernon Ward is a good painter is if you look at his ducks, you can see the eyes follow you around the room.

Peter Cook . 1937-1995 . English satirist, writer and comedian . At the art gallery

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness.

James Joyce . 1882-1941 . Irish novelist and poet . A portrait of the artist as a young man

One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.

Henry Miller . 1891-1980 . American writer . Big Sur and the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche . 1844-1900 . German philosopher . Beyond good and evil

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

George Orwell . 1903-1950 . British novelist, essayist and journalist . Animal farm

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

Marcel Proust . 1871-1922 . French novelist, essayist and critic . The captive [trans, CK Scott Moncrieff]

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see.

William Shakespeare . 1564-1616 . English poet and playwright . Sonnet 43  [wink=sleep]

The question is not what you look at, but what you see.

Henry David Thoreau . 1817-1862 . American author, poet and philosopher . Journal

copyright © 2014 Jeremy Marchant