Quotes About Attention

his nails clicked and clacked

People in a hurry get noticed.

The eye should learn to listen before it looks.

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

Many lonely people, Strike knew, found it pleasant to be the focus of somebody's undivided attention and sought to prolong the novel experience.

Strike noticed that, in spite of Duffield's air of disorientation and distress, he had made a good job of applying his eyeliner.

Memories like shrapnel, forever embedded, infected by what had come later…words of love and undying devotion, times of sublime happiness, lies upon lies upon lies…his attention kept sliding away from the stories he was reading.

Strike's eyes followed her hand, but what caught his attention was not the small stack of neatly written papers she was showing him, but the sapphire engagement ring. There was a pause. Robin wondered why her heart was pummeling her ribs. How ridiculous to feel defensive . . . it was up to her whether she married Matthew . . . ludicrous even to feel she had to state that to herself . . .

If Jonny Rokeby turned up here, yes, the press would be fighting tooth and nail to get a shot of him. For fuck's sake. You're not that famous. Get the fuck over yourself.

When Heather pulled her chair in, one of the bright overhead lights illuminated her breasts so that they looked like twin moons; the waiter who'd arrived to hand out menus stared for a few seconds as though dazed.

Religion has been the enemy of social order, because it directs the attention of man to another world. Religion teaches its votaries to sacrifice this world for the sake of that other. The effect is to weaken the ties that hold families and States together. Of what consequence is anything in this world compared with eternal joy?

When you have fans who are hassling you the entire game and you ignore them, they respect you because their job is to try and distract you. And if they don't distract you, that means you're focused on doing your job. And who knows, by the end, sometimes you even win them over.

We are, paradoxically, unkind to the present, ignoring the opportunity to project it into the future, forgetting it as soon as it is past. As we would injure children by spoiling them, we injure time by being too attentive to its ephemera.

Intimacy is to love what concentration is to work: a simultaneous drawing together of attention and release of energy.

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

In the power of fixing the attention lies the most precious of the intellectual habits.

Sometimes pain is God's megaphone, his only way to get our attention.

We are now exposed to more images in a day than anyone in the 14th century would have known in a lifetime. [...] Most of it is garbage. Most of it needs excising. Even if we're fearful that we might be missing something. We are probably not. We have to discard. We have to throw things away, cleanse the doors of our perception and work out what is worth looking at, what is worth remembering, what are the images that matter, what will we retain.

Psychologist Susan Fiske observes, 'Attention is directed up the hierarchy. Secretaries know more about their bosses than vice versa; graduate students know more about their advisors than vice versa.' Fiske explains this happens because, like our fellow primates, 'people pay attention to those who control their outcomes. In an effort to predict and possibly influence what is going to happen to them, people gather information about those with power.

Yet invisibility is a double-edged sword. It provides protection because sometimes attracting a jerk's attention is even worse than being

The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.

read faster and better is the understanding of a text, because the brain has less time for distractions.

Feeding that ego by consistently printing and televising stories about the murders was assuring that there would be more murders.

We are already the most over informed, under reflective people in a history of civilisation. We already have a 24h news cycle, internet newspapers and continuous information about day to day unfolding of civic proceedings. Better informed people are not necessarily better educated people.