Quotes About Attention

Unfortunately," he said, "we have short memories. Most heroes are forgotten by the next news cycle.

Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry. — from "Thing Language

Too often people are focused on the "urgent" at the expense of the important.

Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.

The power of television has nothing to do with its quality.

I just think old old movies, they make you concentrate and pay attention so much more. They feel so warm. A lot of modern digital videotape, it's just too bright. Don't know why, it's not warm.

I suspect that much of life is like that. We seldom see what is closest to our eyes.

She's always getting into trouble because she gets bored really really easily. [...] My mum says it's because Celia has an attention span the size of a sesame seed. Celia's mum says it's because Celia's identity is unfurling itself slowly, like a tulip bud, and it's a breathtakingly beautiful thing to see.

Jacqueline Davies

to listen for real.

If you do something that is forbidden, it is the action that is the target. If you do something that isn't forbidden, and they intervene, then it's not the activity that's attracting the attention, it is you yourself.

The Doctor gave a modest shrug. "Well, I must admit that I made heads turn wherever I go. It's a burden that I just have to live with.

The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression.

punctiliousness—in

she talked in one of her memoirs of ignoring her little brother when she was supposed to be looking after him: "I liked reading a book much more than I liked looking after him (and even now I like reading a book more than I like looking after my own children...)

and every time, he was still more acutely aware of their eyes on him and of the thoughts behind their eyes

The media only cares about the Yuma 14 because of the large numbers. But this tragedy goes on every day. It never stops. If only one person dies out there, it is exactly the same horror story.

Advertising is what happens on TV when people go to bathroom.

If we are called to attention by God's Life and Holy Spirit, then the 'spiritual life' is not a pleasant option we might like to pursue when we have space and time; it is that which is now creating its own space and time within us, and to neglect it is to lose ourselves.

he wants her to be thinking about him.

If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed.

With my new habit of carrying binoculars everywhere, I feel imbued with a readiness to see, an attitude that my life itself is a kind of field trip. The urban naturalist has the terrific luxury of stepping out her door and into "the field," without long rides or carpools, or putting money in for gas and Dairy Queen. When does the field trip being? Whenever we start paying attention.

But I believed in the power of sacrament, in very much the way I do today—not as a Catholic but as a human open to the truth that something can be made sacred by the attention we grant it.

For one thing, it is hard for me to let a sentence stand if I see something wrong with it. Even when I'm writing a grocery list it is hard for me not to correct a misspelling.