Window Gazing Quotes & Sayings

Strangers are never seen through a window. When our eyes are cast upon another, we are in fact gazing into the depths of a mirror. If you truly desire to understand how you feel about yourself, just take an honest look at how you view the world around you. — Carl Henegan

Listen, open a window to God and begin to delight yourself by gazing upon Him through the opening. — Rumi

The International Space Station is a phenomenal laboratory, an unparalleled test bed for new invention and discovery. Yet I often thought, while silently gazing out the window at Earth, that the actual legacy of humanity's attempts to step into space will be a better understanding of our current planet and how to take care of it. — Chris Hadfield

It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out of the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could Laika possibly be looking at? — Haruki Murakami

You are like a shell," he said. "A seashell. Hollow but beautiful."
"Hollow." She nodded.
For the rest of the day, they sat not far from each other, gazing out the window at the light shifting almost imperceptibly. They sat about and let themselves be objects on which dust might settle, air might past, light could play.
"I am just an emptiness," she said.
"No," he told her. "You are a resting place. — Ramona Ausubel

There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone. — Anne Rice

What do you think you're here to do?'
She paused a moment, gazing out the rattling side window at the distant mountains.
'To help people along the way, ' she said, 'to bring them hot coffee when they're cold and scared to death and hangin' on for dear life. — Stanley Gordon West

If there was anything that seemed like paradise to me as a kid, it was when I faked my parents into believing I was asleep, but was staring out the window, gazing at the street lights and the wonder of where they could take me. — Michael Martinelli

If he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought. As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible. He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain. Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness. — Neal Stephenson

Prince Albert was gazing out of the window into the dark streets. Grace's eyes locked with Prince Albert's and she immediately sank into curtsey. On rising, she blushed to see that he was nodding in acknowledgment and smiling. Not knowing what else to do, she curtseyed again, and while her knee was still bent, the traffic eased and the royal carriage moved off. — Mary Hooper

Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'. — Alain De Botton

I was a real daydreamer at school, gazing out of the window and losing myself in imaginary worlds. — Talulah Riley

Adam's father just stood there, looking. And they sat there, looking back. Ronan was coiled and simmering, one hand resting on his door.
"Don't," said Adam.
But Ronan merely hit the window button. The tinted glass hissed down. Ronan hooked his elbow on the edge of the door and continued gazing out the window. Adam knew that Ronan was fully aware of how malevolent he could appear, and he did not soften himself as he stared across the patchy dark grass at Robert Parrish. Ronan Lynch's stare was a snake on the pavement where you wanted to walk. It was a match left on your pillow. It was pressing your lips together and tasting your own blood. — Maggie Stiefvater

He asked her, 'Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?'
The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and said, 'I feel sorry for you, dear Youth, because I know where you are gazing and what you are waiting for. I feel sorry for you and your mother.'
Perhaps because of these words, or perhaps because of something else, there was a change in the Youth's mood. The Garden, flowering behind the high fence below his window, and exuding a wonderful fragrance, suddenly seemed somehow strange to him; and an ominous sensation, a sudden fear, gripped his heart with a violent palpitation, like heady and languid fragrances rising from brilliant flowers.
'What is happening?' he wondered in confusion.
("The Poison Garden") — Valery Bryusov

So I need to lay down some ground rules."
"Rules for the use of the ground?" He's gazing out the window. "Am I still allowed to step on it? — Eva Morgan

Nonetheless, gazing out the train window at a random sample of the Western world, I could not avoid noticing a kind of separation between human beings and all other species. We cut ourselves off by living in cement blocks, moving around in glass-and-metal bubbles, and spending a good part of our time watching other human beings on television. Outside, the pale light of an April sun was shining down on a suburb. I opened a newspaper and all I could find were pictures of human beings and articles about their activities. There was not a single article about another species. — Jeremy Narby

No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone. — Daphne Kalotay

Gazing out of the window, the gravel path roared as it was crushed into submission under the wheels of the car that was taking me towards a menacing looking medieval castle with two huge and terrifying turrets that seemingly reached out towards me. I imagined that I was the gravel and the wheels of the car were the social care system. — Stephen Richards

He was slumped in the back, gazing out of the window, as though his parents were two people who had picked him up hitchhiking, connected to him merely by chance and proximity. — J.K. Rowling

I would lie for hours by the window gazing down upon the black lake and up at the mountains silhouetted against the wan sky, with stars suspended above. Then a fearfully sweet, overpowering emotion would take hold of me - as though all the nighttime beauty looked at me accusingly, stars and mountain and lake longing for someone who understood the beauty and agony of their mute existence, who could express it for them, as though I were the one meant to do this and as though my true calling were to give expression to inarticulate nature in poems. — Hermann Hesse

I settle back in my seat, gazing out the window as we cross the bridge toward New Jersey. I don't know where the heck he's taking me, but I'm happy to let him. I'd follow Dean Di Laurentis to the ends of the earth. To the bowels of a volcano, if he asked me to be the Meg Ryan to his Tom Hanks. To fucking Mordor, if he asked me to be the Sam to his Frodo. To -

"We're here," he announces.

I'm jolted out of the most ridiculous train of thought I've ever ridden. — Elle Kennedy

I sit at my window gazing The world passes by, nods to me And is gone. — Rabindranath Tagore

We speed through the streets past modern buildings and ancient architecture. Gazing through the taxi window Rome becomes a wet painting someone has wiped a hand across. — Kevin James Moore

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between ... Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued-that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more production, or faster-paced ... I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness. — Rebecca Solnit

The most dangerous lie in America isn't a political one," he'd told her, as he stood by the plate glass window, gazing down at the frigid Helsinki skyline. "It's the lie that who we are is some fixed self-determined truth. That there's some absolute us-ness in our character that's unchangeable and real, and that we have an obligation to be true to this us-ness, no matter the cost. As if who we are could exist in the absence of other people. We're no more eternal than a single star, Sadie. Remember that. We shine. We burn out. But together, we can light the sky. — Stephanie Kuehn

Brookfield, my correspondent, writes that last week he observed him in the moonlight at an advanced hour gazing up at his window."
"Whose window? Brookfield's?"
"Yes, sir. Presumably under the impression that it was the young lady's."
"But what the deuce is he doing at Twing at all?"
"Mr Little was compelled to resume his old position as tutor to Lord Wickhammersley's son at Twing Hall, sir. Owing to having been unsuccessful in some speculations at Hurst Park at the end of October."
"Good Lord, Jeeves! Is there anything you don't know?"
"I couldn't say, sir. — P.G. Wodehouse

The universe of his own feelings keeps crowding everyone else's out. It is a constant struggle to see other people as people, rather than as denizens of a dimension one level below the one in which he's doomed to wander, imperially alone. That someone close to him might right now be awake in a different part of the city, feeling a pain every bit as real as his own . . . he can think it, but cannot seem to remember it. And is 'remember' even the right word for something for which you have zero empirical evidence? Postulate, maybe. Imagine. He sweeps the lens back toward the window, where the cat hasn't stirred. Her tail twitches. An idea threatens to form, but doesn't. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was "having a bad spell," Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. ("When I was a girl," she had once told a friend, "I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things, and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough ... ") — Truman Capote

And after you were up, when the light had come and the moon had gone, you found the path again waiting through the open window, the faces at the table gazing with you, as you sat with your coffee, silently letting the sense of rest seat home, the body ready to walk, in rhythm and in rhyme, with the given, unspoken source. — David Whyte

Because she looks to the sky so often, people think that her life is sweet, that her eyes are dotted with dreamy stars. But quite the opposite is true and I wish they could see - she looks up so much because all around her it's hard to see without breaking her heart. She once saw in a movie a window sign that said "We're all in the gutter; but some of us are looking at the stars." From that movie onwards, she decided to look up! Doesn't mean her life is sweet, doesn't mean her eyes are dotted with dreamy stars. — C. JoyBell C.

Across the distance, the Acropolis museum cradled within its protective walls its legendary treasures, lulling them to a peaceful sleep under the eerie light from the heavens. Yet, through the large window, the five Caryatids stood alert on their strong platform. The ageless maidens with the long braided hair down their backs remained awake even at this hour gazing across to the Acropolis, full of nostalgia for their sacred home. Inside their marble chests, they nurtured as always, precious hope for the return of their long lost sister. — Effrosyni Moschoudi

All of us tend to look at photographs as if we are simply gazing through a two-dimensional window onto some outside world. This is almost a perceptual necessity; in order to see what the photograph is of, we must first repress our consciousness of what the photograph is. — Geoffrey Batchen

...the Indian boy is the result of a curious convolution of branches in an old chestnut; there are two perfectly formed legs, a long slim body, a small knotted head, and two branching arms... The only drawback is that in order to [see him] you have to be lying in the bath. Unless you are in a prone position, gazing out of one particular window, he refuses to materialize.... Very few other people have seen him. You cannot ask people to come up to the bathroom and lie flat on their backs in order to see the little Indian boy. It would make them gloomy and suspicious, particularly if they were females. 'If you come up and lie down in the bathroom I will show you my little Indian boy....' No. Definitely not. Out. — Beverley Nichols

Kay sat gazing out the window of her bedroom, trying to understand the mesmerizing blue of the sky overhead. She was sure there was a scientific explanation having to do with the angle of the sun this time of year, or some other equally-as-boring reason for its uniqueness. But Kay preferred to imagine it like a divine (either small or big "d") overture playing a sentimental recap of summer which gracefully segued to a seductive preview of the coming autumn. — Delora Dennis

Everyone is always learning something new," my father would remind me when he checked to see if I was doing my homework and found me gazing out the window at the stars. "If not, why be alive? — Marjorie Agosin

Now, an hour later, Ethan stood at a window, gazing at the rain, like threads of seed pearls, accessorizing the hills of Bel Air.
Watching weather clarified his thinking.
Sometimes only nature felt real, while all human monuments and actions seemed to be the settings and the plots of dreams. — Dean Koontz

If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the window in question and you happened as well to be feeling unprecedentedly calm, four-tenths of a second was more than enough time to identify the falling object as your husband of forty-seven years. — Jonathan Franzen