Quotes About Attention

I get embarrassed a lot of times getting attention, but I like being onstage. Do you know what I mean? If I'm in a crowd of people and they're all looking at me, I will feel embarrassed. It's a strange dichotomy.

It does get strange when you realize people will hang around for hours to get a glimpse of you doing scenes outside.

It's been a very strange thing to see the attention my clothes have gotten, just because it's so inversely related to the amount of thought I put into them.

Trying to make strangers laugh is crazy and more than a little narcissistic.

Being 36 years old changes you a lot, and so does eight years away from career, fame, needing attention, needing to be loved by strangers on some level. I was loving anonymity. I was loving the fact that I could meet a girl who didn't know who I was. I enjoyed it very much, I have to say.

I've become a little immune to the gazes of strangers because it's been a part of my life for so long.

Telling a story is not like weaving a tapestry to cover up the world, it is rather a way of guiding attention of listeners or readers into it.

native dwellers … learn through an education of attention. The novice hunter … travels through the country with his mentors, and as he goes, specific features are pointed out to him. Other things he discovers for himself, in the course of further forays, by watching, listening and feeling

A person who can "tell" is one who is perpetually attuned to picking up information in the environment … and the teller, in rendering his knowledge explicit, conducts the attention of his audience along the same paths as his own

How unsettling is it, she wonders, to fool around with ferrets watching you? Their beady button eyes.

Your ticket says via Pordenone," he told me. "Don't you read your documento di viaggio?" I was fascinated. What kind of man is it who imagines that when one buys a train ticket one then stops to read it?

The most practical of all methods for controlling the mind is the habit of keeping it busy with a definite purpose."73

Beautiful women can be like dynamite," (I said to Paul.)… "Now, now. There's nothing wrong with dynamite if it's treated right," he said. It's the men who go around with lighted matches that cause the trouble. By that, I mean they've got their dicks hanging out of their trousers all the time. You can see how that can be a problem for the ladies?

Have you noticed that human beings don't have any patience? It's always about them.

As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.

It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense of attentional crisis, at least in the West - one captured by the phrase ''homo distractus,'' a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices.

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.

When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, "My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent.

For how we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine. The

any and all information that one consumes - pays attention to - will have some influence, even if just forcing a reaction. That idea, in turn, has a very radical implication, for it suggests that sometimes we overestimate our own capacity for truly independent thought.

It is shocking how little it has been necessary to defend the sheer reach of the attention merchant into the entirety of our lived experience. Formerly the state of technology imposed its own limits, but at a time when these limits have been effectively eliminated, it is for us to ask some fundamental questions: Do we draw any lines between the private and the commercial? If so, what times and spaces should we consider as too valuable, personal, or sacrosanct for the usual onslaught?

As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.

the lasting power of attentional habits is never to be underestimated