Acute Awareness Quotes

We're highly social animals - I'm told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid.

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.

It's in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your position.

A sharp tongue is the only edge tool that grows keener with constant use.

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom.

This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.

With respect to the present time, there are few persons who unite the qualifications of good observers with a situation favourable for accurate observation.

I've always had an acute sense of mortality, maybe because my father's a minister.

You should not only have attention to everything, but a quickness of attention, so as to observe at once all the people in the room--their motions, their looks and their words--and yet without staring at them and seeming to be an observer.

I'm painfully aware of my surroundings at all times.

Presence of mind, penetration, fine observation, are the sciences of women; ability to avail themselves of these is their talent.