Quotes About Attention

It's time for you to give yourself the love, attention, loyalty, and care you've been trying to get from others your whole life. Grief has you gripped tightly by the ankles, and she may not let you go too soon. There's nowhere to go but home to yourself. This simple gesture of giving yourself your full attention when sorrow is shaking you to the bone promises to carve depth and kindness into the core of who you are—more than anything else I know.

foster a teacher's habit of paying close attention to what students say, whether they speak through words or actions.

Listen to. To hear with thoughtful attention. To hold something close, to attend to it, to be astonished by it, to devote your life to its mysteries, to name it precisely, to wonder how it comes to be. To stay awake to it. To move closer to the wild and twittering night. To let it cover you and keep you safe. To me, listening is starting to sound a lot like love.

What are you doing here in London?" she asked, carefully guarding her tone so it might sound gracious. "I thought you would be in Mawbry, or Wirkinton… or some such place." Christopher began to deal, but his attention never strayed far from her. She was quite lovely in her finery, and his gaze eagerly feasted on the beauteous fare. "I saw no reason to stay when you weren't there." -Erienne & Christopher

Tory was starting to feel a little foolish standing here with her hands in the air. It was like the whole bar had assembled to watch her nails dry. Why didn't someone say something?

Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?

When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it's not about voice, it's about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don't just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.

Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.

if the scriptures don't sometimes pierce us like a sword, we're not paying close enough attention.

Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.

Language used truly, not mere talk, neither propaganda, nor chatter, has real power. Its words are allowed to be themselves, to bless or curse, wound or heal. They have the power of a 'word made flesh,' of ordinary speech that suddenly takes hold, causing listeners to pay close attention, and even to release bodily sighs--whether of recognition, delight, grief, or distress.

Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous attention to detail in the book Leviticus, involving God in the minutiae of daily life—all the cooking and cleaning of a people's domestic life—might be revisioned as the very love of God. A God who cares so much as to desire to be present in everything we do.

People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention. For

Remember: what you focus on becomes bigger.

It's a sad day when a cartoon is doing more and cares more and pays more attention to the environment than our president.

Even movie and romance magazines, whose beauty ads explicitly connected makeup and sex appeal, maintained a logic that downplayed women's sexual assertion: A woman acted upon her desire for a man by making herself beautiful, in order to catch his attention and awaken his desire.

In greeting, we Southerners say "hey" not "hi." To alert, draw the attention of, or show objection to another, we also say "hey," but air is expelled and the ending is truncated. This

Again, I checked my rear.

I could announce one morning that the world was going to blow up in three hours and people would be calling in about my hair!

Just because I'm flaunting it doesn't mean you can stare for hours on end. A polite ogle is appreciated and suitable for a flaunt. Slobbering is not.

Please keep your children at your side. Unattended children will be given a shot of espresso and a puppy." (petting zoo sign)

Please keep your children at your side. Unattended children will be given a shot of espresso and a puppy.

When we focus on what is good and beautiful in someone, whether or not we think that they "deserve" it, the good and beautiful are strengthened merely by the light of our attention.

home is less a location than a discipline. It is a way of being, a domestic, considered attention to familiar routines and the small, essential details of everyday life. From now on, I promised myself, home would be wherever I was, not the place that I one day hoped it to be. I would create it by being present. I would try to do better.