Quotes About Attention

Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what's going on is that we're all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.

I hoped her life would turn topsy-turvy enough to get her attention. Topsy-turvy is often a symptom for the presence of God—the last become first, the hungry are fed, the obnoxious are welcomed.

A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost

My deepest belief is that to live as if we're dying can set us free. Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not to sweat the small things.

Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won't do any of those things; you'll never get in that way.

And while everyone has to make a living and show up for family, listening is optional. You have to make a conscious decision to listen harder.

I tell the six-year-olds that if they want to have great lives, they need to read a lot or listen to the written word. If they rely only on their own thinking, they will not notice the power that is all around them, the force-be-with–you kind of power. Reading and writing help us take the blinders off so we can look around and say "Wow," so we can look at life and our lives with care, and curiosity, and attention to detail, which are what will make us happy and less afraid.

So as Samuel Beckett admonished us to fail again, and fail better, we try to pray again, and pray better, for slightly longer and with slightly more honesty, breathing more, deeper, and with more attention.

You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.

T. S. Eliot wrote, 'Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.' We long for this, and yet we check our smartphones every ten minutes for news, texts, distraction.

It does not matter what the media say, so long as they say something with one's name in it.

She sorted out the young men. Tanner's opportunism amused but did not specifically attract her; the blond Nordsen seemed too simple; dark-haired Al-atpay had a kind of obstinacy with which she felt no compassion: Mir-Ahnin's bitterness hinted an inner darkness she did not wish to lighten, although he made the biggest outward play for her attention.

Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction...What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.

They're empty, insecure alone; they only feel real when other people listen to them and take notice.

am surprised your mother has not given you the same advice." Christina stared at her. "She has, she has done for years. I pay no attention. One's mother is always giving one good advice.

There's a terrible temptation to look at only what you want to, and carefully avoid seeing anything else.

I resolved to move just a little bit more slowly through the world, to look around myself with greater care, and to try to remain conscious of all that was going on around me at all times.

He got away with those affairs because he was never inattentive to Ellie. Some of the other guys around here should take a lesson from that. What women hate is when you turn cold to them. If you treat them like queens, they'll let you have a concubine or two outside the palace.

Sometimes you need to be forced to study what's right in front of you.

Were I not so busy with the matters of the Mayfair Witches," he wrote, "perhaps this disappearance would never have occurred. I might have been more attentive to D. during his time of transition. I might have held him more firmly in my affections and thereby earned more surely his complete trust. As it is, I can only surmise what has become of him, and I fear he has met with spirtual catastrophe quite against his will.

The man just stood there, looking at him; and Elliott had the weirdest sense of being listened to, studied. It made him aware of how inattentive most human beings were in general.

There isn't a soul in the world whom Heaven doesn't regard in particular fashion. There isn't a sigh or a word that Heaven fails to hear." I

God knows that I have some accursed capacity to draw their attention and to endow them with some crucial vitality.

He considered us not worthy of his attentions, and look, how he lavished all his strength of a boy. But I must say you are a most beautiful boy.