Quotes About Attention

boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.

For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention ad awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad, petty, unsexy ways every day.

And a funny thing happens. The man begins to like the Thermos woman. Not love, but like, which is something the man has never experienced before, and finds different, because it involves directing a lot more emotional attention to the actual other person than the old uncontrollable passionate love had involved, involves caring about the whole other person, including the facets and features that have nothing whatsoever to do with the man.

Is it showing off if you hate it?

The only way you can communicate at a high level is to be conscious of everything you write — every comma, every pronoun, every word, and all their implications.

great big huge titties

Tv's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. tv is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.

lo más peligroso que tiene la educación académica, por lo menos en mi caso, es que habilita mi tendencia a intelectualizar las cosas en exceso, a perderme en el pensamiento abstracto en lugar de limitarme a prestar atención a lo que está pasando delante de mí. Y en lugar de prestar atención a lo que está pasando dentro de mí.

La vostra preoccupazione per ciò che gli altri pensano di voi scompare una volta che capite quanto di rado pensano a voi.

Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us27 spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.

On one level my attention was intently focused on her voice and story. On another level I - it was if my mind was having a garage sale.

David Foster Wallace

That's why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They're not saying effortless in terms of it didn't seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it — the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you're bored, you're conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is really freedom. That is being taught how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race - the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary.

STREITFELD: Scared is a word that you often used to describe yourself. WALLACE: Writers tend to be shy, bookish people. We're always on the fringes of the party, resenting the attention paid to others. And then finally when attention is paid to you, it is great and yet part of it sucks you liver out. Deep down it was the thing you always felt would make everything OK, and then you get it, and find everything isn't OK, and you're still scared.

Probablemente lo más peligroso que tiene la educación académica, por lo menos en mi caso, es que habilita mi tendencia a intelectualizar las cosas en exceso, a perderme en el pensamiento abstracto en lugar de limitarme a prestar atención a lo que está pasando delante de mí. Y en lugar de prestar atención a lo que está pasando dentro de mí.

It is hard to notice what you see every day.

A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.

Entertainment's chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can't tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise.