Sighting Quotes & Sayings

People are bringing shotguns to UFO sightings in Fife, Alabama. I asked a guy, "Why do you bring a gun to a UFO sighting?" Guy said, "Way-ul, we didn' wanna be ab-duc-ted." If I lived in Fife, Alabama, I would be on my hands and knees every night praying for abduction. — Bill Hicks

Well," Tessa said, sighting along the line of the knife, "you behave as if you dislike me. In fact, you behave as if you dislike us all."
"I don't," Gabriel said. "I just dislike him." He pointed at Will.
"Dear me," said Will, and he took another bite of his apple. "Is it because I'm better-looking than you? — Cassandra Clare

It's a very typical UFO sighting. Carter said it changed color and, in the physical report, described it as being about the size of the moon. And he saw it with about twenty-five other people. — Dwight Schultz

She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale. — Stephen King

*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin. — Herman Melville

Have you ever sailed across an ocean, Donald? On a sail boat surrounded by sea with no land in sight. Without even the possibility of sighting land for days to come. To stand at the helm of your destiny. I want that, one more time. I want to be in the Piazza Del Campo in Sienna. To feel the surge as ten race horses go thundering by. I want another meal in Paris, at L'Ambroisie in the Place Des Vosges. I want another bottle of wine. And then another. I want the warmth of a women in the cool set of sheets. One more night of jazz at the Vanguard. I want to stand on summits and smoke cubans and feel the sun on my face for as long as I can. Walk on the wall again. Climb the tower. Ride the river. Stare at the frescoes. I want to sit in the garden and read one more good book. Most of all I want to sleep. I want to sleep like I slept when I was a boy. Give me that. Just one time. — Anonymous

At the heart of the mystery of Bigfoot is a paradox: many people see Sasquatches, but no one can find one. This is an extremely uncomfortable dilemma for Bigfoot advocates. Either Sasquatches are too rare to locate, in which case they should also be too rare to see; or the common and widespread sighting reports are by and large accurate, in which case science should long ago have located a specimen. — Daniel Loxton

How was Gengo to know, Saigyo reflected, that this unheroic existence imposed even greater torment than the icy lashings of the Nachi Falls in its thousand-foot leap? How was Gengo to realize that Saigyo had not slept a single night undisturbed since he had fled his home for the Eastern Hills, that his sleep was haunted by the cries of his beloved daughter from whom he had torn himself.
Who knew that during the day, when he went about his tasks of drawing water and chopping wood as he composed verses, the sighting of the wind in the treetops of the valleys below and the pines surrounding the temple sounded to him like the mourning of his young wife, and so troubled his nights that sleep no longer visited him? Never again would Saigyo find peace. He had wrenched asunder the living boughs of the tree that was his life. Remorse and compassion for his loved ones would dog him to the end of his days. — Eiji Yoshikawa

A ghost sighting is usually nothing more than your brain trying to put a familiar face on something that does not have a face at all. — David Wong

No number of sightings of white swans can prove the theory that all swans are white. The sighting of just one black one may disprove it. — Karl Popper

For planetary explorers like us, there is little that can compare to the sighting of activity on another solar system body. This has been a heart-stopper, and surely one of our most thrilling results. — Carolyn Porco

Dame Edna is that rarest sighting in our time of the absolute comic, an inspired personification of caprice whose comedy answered the primal call to take the audience for a tumble. — John Lahr

to catch it called for harpooning it - which was Ned Land's business; to harpoon it called for sighting it - which was the crew's business; and to sight it called for encountering it - which was a chancy business. — Jules Verne

There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage. — Mark Twain

From Woody's Restaurant, Middlebury"


Today, noon, a young macho friendly waiter and three diners,
business types - two males, one female -
are in a quandary about the name of the duck paddling
Otter Creek,
the duck being brown, but too large to be a female mallard.
They really want to know, and I'm the human-watcher behind the nook
of my table,
camouflaged by my stillness and nonchalant plumage.
They really want to know.
This sighting I record in the back of my Field Guide to People. — Greg Delanty

An image is seen based on the light speed between the observer and the event. An image is light. Scientists theorize about sighting the edge of the universe and believe they are looking at the beginning of time. Things started moving away from each other when the Big Bang exploded 18 billion years ago. Sages theorize that this impassive distancing will end someday. Then things will reverse and start moving back towards each other. If reversal fails and contraction continues, the universe will collapse into itself, imploding into a Black Hole that can encapsulate an entire universe into a dark space the size of a fist. The size of a fist mirrors the size of a heart. — Eileen R. Tabios

Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare. — Garth Risk Hallberg

I felt like an Israeli girl soldier, in shorts and the hot wind, sighting down the barrel of the rifle, holding the .38 with both hands. It was a strange feeling, him looking at me as I aimed. I found I couldn't quite lose myself in the target. His eyes split my attention between the C in Coke and my awareness of him watching me. And I thought, this was what it was like to be beautiful. — Janet Fitch

Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This ripeness is so delightful to me that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem, as it were, to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Practically every woman in town makes a showing at Tucker's after a Jake sighting. I feel like I am watching the National Geographic Channel on mating rituals in the wild. — L.A. Fiore

That instant proved to me that it was not the first, almost unemotional, sighting of a potential lover that was significant, but the second, the moment not of recognition but of confirmation, so that every other consideration is irrelevant, as if it might have mattered at some point in the past but no longer had any currency in the charged wordless exchange that seals the matter for ever, regardless of the dangers thus incurred and whatever the cost. — Anita Brookner

But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already thinking of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly, through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. — William Gibson

Nine-year-old Laila rose from bed, as she did most mornings, hungry for the sight of her friend Tariq. This morning, however, she knew there would be no Tariq sighting.
- How long will you be gone? - She'd asked when Tariq had told her that his parents were
taking him south, to the city of Ghazni, to visit his paternal uncle.
- Thirteen days
- Thirteen days?
- It's not so long. You're making a face, Laila.
- I am not.
- You're not going to cry, are you?
- I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.
She'd kicked at his shin, not his artificial but his real one, and he'd playfully whacked
the back of her head.
Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, Laila had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which Tariq's father sometimes played old Pashto songs, time stretched and contracted depending on Tariq's absence or presence. — Khaled Hosseini

But all this happened for one basic reason: no matter how many detours and adjustments it made, the caravan moved toward the same compass point. Once obstacles were overcome, it returned to its course, sighting on a star that indicated the location of the oasis. — Paulo Coelho

The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the Toyota's headlights. The body could drive, I told myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind's eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already thinking of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images, glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota's slipstream. — William Gibson

Miss Manners herself, while never rude, is given to pulling a fast pinch in the way of a handshake on those who believe in kissing on, not even the first date, but the first sighting. — Judith Martin

Titus's jaw dropped. 'Those caravanists, they were mages?'
'They most certainly were.'
'But one fainted and two reached for their rifles when they saw the sand wyvern.'
'It's a good policy for at least one member of the group to pretend to fall unconscious at a mage sighting. And I always think the rifles are a touch of genius - any time you see someone holding a firearm, your instinct is to dismiss that person as a nonmage. — Sherry Thomas

We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel. — Ivan Chtcheglov

Information on UFOs, including sighting reports, has been and is still being officially withheld. — Gordon Cooper

[...] these questions gave way, in the course of time, to a different preoccupation, namely, a slow and growing awareness of familiarity with the landscape into which she was being carried. A familiarity based not on the sighting of particular landmarks, but on her feeling that the very contours of the hills and fields, and the very shapes and colours of the buildings, now appeared as surviving monuments to the existence of a much earlier self whom she had long forgotten. She knew, of course, that they could not bring that self back to life, perish the thought, but they reminded her of it in a way which she did not find disagreeable. — Jonathan Coe

Meeting a vampire is kind of like a celebrity sighting, but where the celebrity possibly wants to kill you. — Adrianne Ambrose

We'll be busy tonight." He isn't wrong. Practically every woman in town makes a showing at Tucker's after a Jake sighting. I feel like I am watching the National Geographic Channel on mating rituals in the wild. I can hear the narrator in my head. The female approaches, the sway of her hips a sign of her willingness to reproduce. Obviously in heat, her open blouse exposes her unnaturally large . . . "Hey, — L.A. Fiore

Think of the Christmas present
of gashes you opened when, in an attempt
to be Superman, you slid in stocking feet
on a slippery wood floor and crashed
half way through a window. Hopes
of heroism dashed on the heels
of no clear sighting of Santa. — Kristen Henderson

I am wet shoes.
I am cold, damp breath.
I am sweating hands.
I am gravity crushing the grass beneath my boots.
I am Kevlar and metal and lead.
I am laser sighting.
I am death.
And I am coming. — Shane Kuhn

A streak of green fire blasted out of the back of the shed, passed a foot over the heads of the mob, and burned a charred rosette in the woodwork over the door.
Then came a voice that was a honeyed purr of sheer deadly menance.
"This is Lord Mountjoy Quickfang Winterforth IV, the hottest dragon in the city. It could burn your head clean off."
Captain Vimes limped forward from the shadows. A small and extremely frightened golden dragon was clamped firmly under one arm. His other hand held it by the tail. The rioters watched it, hypnotized.
"Now I know what you're thinking," Vimes went on, softly. "You're wondering, after all this excitement, has it got enough flame left? And, y'know, I ain't so sure myself ... "
He leaned forward, sighting between the dragon's ears, and his voice buzzed like a knife blade: "What you've got to ask yourself is: Am I feeling lucky? — Terry Pratchett

Living in L.A., you couldn't help picking up tidbits of the surf culture, almost through osmosis ... it was in the air, like vitamin D and the odd Brad Pitt sighting. — Ophelia London

On sighting mathematicians poetry should unhook the algebra from their minds and replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra. — Brian Patten

Quote is taken from Chapter 1:
Since Etta could log in her rare Baltimore oriole sighting, she decided she'd had enough birding for one day. It was just a fun hobby, not an obsession. — Ed Lynskey

The proponents of UFOs offer up impressive quantities of principally eyewitness data, which although largely subjective and circumstantial in nature, is nevertheless quite intriguing ... Many of the high-quality sighting reports involve certain objective aspects, which, to an open-minded bystander, are quite impressive. — Peter Davenport

I think if you grow up in a culture where the army is out on the street sighting you with rifles, it has to have some kind of psychological impact. — Adrian McKinty

I had a brief runaway fantasy where I ran away to California, which I'd never been to, to where all the Bigfoots were, and I'd disappear into the woods and live alone, become a rumor, an occasional blurred sighting. Father — Paul Tremblay