Quotes About Attention

We are deaf to what life brings us.

Less has come alive to his senses, his curiosity, his fears, his memory, and entered that separate realm of being in which the outer world does not vanish, not at all, but pricks with painful detail, the province not of the reader or the critic but of that suffering creature trapped behind the looking glass: the writer. For now Less is paying attention.

News you can't read calmly, don't read at all!

In fact, I've come to the conclusion that the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.

We love the way screens can, almost magically, absorb our children's attention and give us a few moments of quiet in the car or before dinner.

I've come to the conclusion that the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.

the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get.

Boredom is actually a crucial warning sign—as important in its own way as physical pain. It's a sign that our capacity for wonder and delight, contemplation and attention, real play and fruitful work, has been dangerously depleted.

In the future, everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.

I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes. ~Andy Warhol 1968 He revised it in 1979: In 15 minutes, everybody will be famous.

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

I know good cooks who'll spend days finding fresh garlic and fresh basil and fresh tarragon, etc., and then use canned tomatoes for the sauce, saying it doesn't matter. But I know it does matter.

stalk2 v. 1 [with obj.] pursue or approach stealthily: a cat stalking a bird. harass or persecute (someone) with unwanted and obsessive attention: for five years she was stalked by a man who would taunt and threaten her.

When I look down, I miss all the good stuff And when I look up, I just trip over things...

She wanted him to notice her so much.

but it was hard to give the real world much notice when he was this close.

She and Effie were already putting on their turtle-and-hare show. Everyone paid lots of attention to Lena at first, because she was striking to look at, but within a few hours or days, they always fully committed their attentions to exuberant, affectionate Effie. Lena felt Effie deserved it. Lena was an introvert. She knew she had trouble connecting with people. She always felt like her looks were fake bait, seeming to offer a bridge to people, which she couldn't easily cross.

I saw Rachel cross her eyes at Jessica, tilt her head to the side and stick her tongue out. If Jessica noticed, she didn't pay attention.

Jessica Ramsey sat next to me, a mystery. I kept looking at her long legs. Maybe she was a dancer or a gymnast or something. Of course, I looked at her face too. Jessica's eyes were huge and dark. Her lashes were so long I wondered if they were fake. Probably not, if her mother was anything like mine, and I decided that was a distinct possibility since Jessica wore glasses and didn't have pierced ears either.

Shannon stopped prancing and tucked herself into a perfect sit. I smacked

there is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation

most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.

Being wisely selfish and being selfless can amount to very much the same thing. There are centuries of anecdotal testimony on this point—and, as we will see, the scientific study of the mind has begun to bear it out. There is now little question that how one uses one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.