Quotes About Attention

I'm only talking to one person here. If that's you, then you need to shut up and listen. If it's not, then you need to shut up because no one's talking to you.

How's Alison getting on?' Conway snorted. 'Tucked up in the sick room like she's dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She's having a great old time.

It was not apathy. It was an intelligent disinterest in those things that could have no bearing on one's existence.

He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward.

All I did was listen, Annie. When the Universe talks, I pay attention." He bent his head close to hers and said quietly, "Funny thing is … the closer you listen, the more it seems to say.

Gradually, after being the target a few times of a similar capriciousness, which he discerned as default behavior for most people, and not liking it, Paul learned to not be more generous or enthusiastic or attentive that he could sustain regardless of his mood and to not talk to people if his only reason to was because he felt lonely or bored.

I felt sort of sad that I couldn't remember the last time, before tonight, that I'd paid such close attention to the sky. It felt like that must be some kind of sign that I'd lost my innocence and grown up without even realizing it.

Two qualities are essential to mindfulness: even-hovering attention and tenacity.

order for mindfulness to work for us, we need to make an effort to strengthen our ability to be mindful.

This quality of seeing things freshly, as though for the first time, lies at the heart of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is not thinking about what we experience, but a direct, bare attention to the experience itself.

Mental noting can also be a help when you need to focus your wandering, confused, or scattered mind.

you can use the mental note "rising, falling" to track the sensations of breathing as your abdomen rises and falls with each breath.

In fact, less than one percent of all the information the mind takes in actually reaches our awareness. Likewise, most of how we react to that information remains outside our awareness;

we are consciously aware of only a tiny portion of our perceptions and actions. To us, that small compartment appears to fill our whole mental cabinet.

But when emotions enter the picture, our mind's selective attention can be less useful: we can avoid noticing something not because it's irrelevant but because it might disturb us.

simply noting the disturbance may be enough to dislodge it from the mind.

Meditating on thoughts—being mindful of them—as he defines it, means "simply to be aware, as thoughts arise, that the mind is thinking, without getting involved in the content: not going off on a train of association, not analyzing the thought and why it came, but merely to be aware at the particular moment [that] 'thinking' is happening. If we fail to do this, to see our thoughts as such, they remain the unconscious filters on our perception.

When the amygdala heats up with intense activity, emotionally loaded thoughts loom larger in our field of attention.

The second way mindfulness disempowers schema thoughts has to do with the nature of attention itself.

mindfulness fills much of our attention with something other than the mental tape loops that activate our schemas.

One method—mental noting, where we label familiar thoughts as such without getting pulled into them—is quite helpful in working with our schemas.

A mental state can last for but a moment, until another state rises to the top of the mind's hierarchy, or it can become a habitual frame of mind.

mindfulness creates a "wise" attention, a space of clarity that emerges when we quiet the mind. It makes us more receptive to the whispers of our innate intuitive wisdom.