Voyeur Quotes

“I likened her to the slender PSYCHÉ and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: The dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her bare feet [...] All this and the pungent air! Ô this night, sweet pungent night! "HÉBÉ" may come but a season. But this girl's season would know a hot spring
and an Indian summer.”
― Roman Payne

“I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“These two developments throw light on what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between the Renaissance and all previous periods of art. We have repeatedly seen that there were these circumstances which could compel the artist to make a distinction between the "technical" proportions and the "objective;" the influence of organic movement, the influence of perspective foreshortening, and the regard for the visual impression of the beholder. These three factors of variation have one thing in common: they all presuppose the artistic recognition of subjectivity. Organic movement introduces into the calculus of artistic composition the subjective will and the subjective emotions of the thing represented; foreshortening the subjective visual experience of the artist; and those "eurhythmic" adjustments which alter that which is right in favor of what seems right, the subjective visual experience of a potential beholder. And it is the Renaissance which, for the first time, not only affirms but formally legitimizes and rationalizes these three forms of subjectivity.”
― Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts

“She has never been in the presence, before, of two people who are in love with each other. She feels like a stray child, ragged and cold, with her nose pressed to a lighted window. A toy-store window, a bakery window, with fancy cakes and decorated cookies. Poverty prevents her entrance. These things are for other people; nothing for her.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“I watched you undress. Shame on you!”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“Personally I believe sometimes ugly things happen to good people and sometimes good people do awful things.”
― Scott Parker, Stock-Still

“Victor Hugo was a passionate observer, partial to death scenes. He had an appetite for extinction, a man sure to be on hand at the sound of a death rattle or the passing of a funeral procession.”
― Helen Bevington, Along Came the Witch: A Journal in the 1960's

“Before I serve you duck soup, I'll serve you salad. Some people like salad dressing, but not me. I prefer salad undressing, because being a voyeur adds spice to the dinner.”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“I don’t want you running around with a little banana-handler!”
― Scott Parker, Stock-Still

“There is a word for people like you, and that word is audience. An audience comes to a theatre perhaps to see something which if they saw it in real life, they may find offensive… Perhaps you’ve come here this evening, because you want to see something you’ve only done in the privacy of your own homes, something perhaps you wished you’d done in the privacy of your own homes or something that you dreamed about doing in the privacy of your own homes. An audience likes to sit in the dark and to watch other people do it. Well, if you’ve paid your money – good luck to you. However, from this end of the telescope things look somewhat different – you all look very small, and very far away and there’s a lot of you. It’s important to remember that there are more of you than of us. So, if it does come to a fight, you will undoubtedly win.”
― Florian Malzacher

“Another prominent examination of this gaze is the analysis of the voyeur. This example does not concern the voyeur’s gaze, which might be considered an evil eye on its own terms. Instead, the gaze of interest is the one the voyeur encounters in discovering himself watched by another. The voyeur peers through a keyhole, attempting to see without being seen. In this situation, he finds himself in his total facticity and freedom, a being unto itself, making choices and dealing with limits. However, the moment he hears footsteps and notices someone looking, the entire situation changes. Previously, he could focus on what he was perceiving. He may have been a “peeping Tom,” but he did not think about himself in those terms. When another gaze arrives, and the voyeur encounters the look, his freedom is turned back on himself. He experiences shame as he is revealed to himself for who he is. In this new situation, the other becomes his master, and he experiences himself alienated, removed, and disconnected from his possibilities, no longer master of his situation. As such, “[t]he Other is the hidden death of my possibilities.”
― Brian W Becker, Evil and Givenness: The Thanatonic Phenomenon

“The Pressure Cooker by Stewart Stafford

We arrive at the sweltering park,
And disturb a larcenous squirrel,
Trash can raider with easy spoils,
He scampers away down the back.

Solo lady in the gazebo watches,
An outdoor Mrs. Bates silhouette,
As a tuft of angel hair rolls along,
I give the thirsty baby hydration.

Transfixed by a burst helium balloon,
Rocking itself to the unheard beats,
Arid breeze, now ceiling conductor,
Our squirrel pal returns to spy on us.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“On the day I started my self-examination I asked myself these questions: ‘Am I interested in people? Do ideas excite me? Am I knowledgeable enough about novels to write one?’ I’m sure there were other questions, but I forget them now.
My earliest memories involve being one among many other children, so I did not grow up with a self-centered view of myself, and because of my early jobs I knew a great deal about life. I had knocked about America as a lad, seen Europe in my college years and had been in the Pacific as an adult. But most important, I had always loved people, their histories, the prestigious things they did and said, and I especially relished their stories about themselves. I was so eager to collect information about everyone I met that I was practically a voyeur, and always it was their accounts that mattered, not mine, for I was a listener, not a talker. If the writing of fiction was the reporting of how human beings behaved, I was surely eligible, for I liked not only their stories, I liked them.
As for ideas on which to base my writing, I was interested in everything—I was a kind of intellectual vacuum cleaner that picked up not only the oddest collection of facts imaginable but also solid material on the basic concerns of life.”
—Chapter XI, “Intellectual Equipment”, page 297”
― James A. Michener, The World Is My Home