Quotes About Attention

Readers want to know a few things right up front, like what the weather is like and the lay of the land, the color of that lake, or the steep pitch of that steeple. Now whether or not these things have one iota to do with your story doesn't concern the reader.

If you are capable of hearing, listen.

Individuals capture attention and engross history, but the most revolutionary changes in Roman politics were the work of families or of a few men.

Lou, honey, I'll buy you a new pair of shoes if you'll stop flashing your panties at everyone sitting across the room from us. You are wearing panties, right?" I glance up and across at Stefan. His words register a moment later and my head swivels toward the other side of the room. There are a number of people staring at me. One of them is Detective Terry Shay. Or I think it is. He's not looking directly at me. He's looking up my skirt

People for the most part pass by the loveliest things in life without paying attention.

Why does it spiral downward, why do things tend to look more and more hopeless? For the same reason that red Dodge pickups seem to proliferate on the highways as soon as you buy one and that pregnant women appear out of nowhere approximately eight months before your baby is due. The more attention you shine on a particular subject, the more evidence of it will grow. Attention is like light and air and water. Shine attention on obstacles and problems and they multiply lavishly.

She had started to understand how a woman's attention could succeed in making sense of a man's blind chaos..

HOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!

Beauty is like drink or comfort, once you get used to it, you stop paying attention.

Lili, I think, saw so many human tragedies all around her ... people arranged it between them ... this was what they wanted ... none of her business ... animal miseries were different ... nobody paid any attention, but for her money only the animals counted ... time has passed, water under the bridge ... all in all I'd say she was right ...

I'm recapitulating...condensing...it's the Readers Digest style...people only have time to read thirty pages...apparently!...maximum!...that's all they have time for! they horse around for sixteen hours out of twenty-four, they sleep, they copulate the rest, where would they find the time to read a hundred pages? oh, do caca, I forgot! as well!

A wise man looks the other way.

J'aurais bien voulu qu'ils fussent ailleurs mes pieds pour le moment, parce que de l'autre côté de la devanture, nous étions observés par les gens en file que nous venions de quitter dans la rue. Ils attendaient que nous eussions fini, nous, de bouffer, pour venir s'attabler à leur tour. C'est même à cet effet et pour les tenir en appétit que nous nous trouvions nous si bien éclairés et mis en valeur, à titre de publicité vivante.

Old Foxy kept on talking!...He was attracting attention in the crowd!...Nobody asked to see his papers...That was the amazing thing!...The kids, the tarts, the soldier-boys ran after him, pulled at him, played tricks on him!...They came touching his dragon, pinching his robe, his behind...

Susannah set the table with Provençal cotton linens, the tablecloth pale pumpkin and the napkins printed with faded red and purple flowers, her throat caught. She had wanted to make this meal so special for Sari and Grey. She set out silverware, bright crockery, a Lucite peppermill and a blue container of Fleur-de-Sel de Camargue. She still had Grey's black scallop shells and she arranged them in the center of the table, around a vase of colorful wildflowers.

In the middle of the night, Miss Clavel turned on the light and said, something is not right! 1941 - Ludwig Bemelmans (American, 1898–1962) -

Don't think, but look! (PI 66)

Sticklers unite, you have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didn't have a lot of that to begin with.

If there is one lesson to be learned from this book, it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation.

As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It's just not cricket.

If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don't bother to go any further.

While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else - yet we see it all the time .

Anders took the phone, but his attention was on the computer on his lap. It had gone into standby mode. As he waited impatiently for it to start up again, he muttered, "I should have told her." "Told who what?" Mortimer asked, distractedly. "Valerie, I should have told her I love her. But I figured she'd think it was too soon and—" He didn't bother finishing.

The mind feasts on what it focuses on. What consumes my thinking will be the making or the breaking of my identity.