Quotes About Attention

BOLO was shorthand for "Be On the Look Out" for.

Now I predict the future / merely by listening to echoes. A slamming door / can tell you everything you need to know. It's not a trick / only a simple matter of wisdom, an obsessive attention / to dreams. — Mary Jo Bang, from "The Oracle," Apology for Want: Poems . (Middlebury; 1st edition July 15, 1997)

older children seldom paid much attention to younger ones. The reverse was not true.

Everyone wears a sign that says "Make me feel important

I am as the flower that gives scent to the morning air. It does not concern itself with who is passing by … Until

She rarely showed her emotions, which appeared to have been burned out by the continual short-circuiting of her attention.

Boys liked it when you were starving, like you had starved yourself for them.

Arrietty used to make her 'e's' like little half-moons with a stroke in the middle-" "Well?" said Kate Mrs. May laughed and took up her work again. "My brother did too," she said.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

Motivate your child to listen with words of support and love that let him know he is safe with you. Send your message in many different ways including talking, writing, drawing, and demonstrating. Touch your child lightly to help him attend to your instructions. Make sure you have his attention by making eye contact. Keep your message simple. Avoid asking a question if there really isn't a choice. Tell him what he can do. Limit the number of instructions you give at one time.

4. PERCEPTIVENESS: Send them to their room to get dressed and they'll never make it. Something along the way—perhaps a commercial on the television—will catch their attention as they walk by and they'll forget about getting dressed. It can take ten minutes to get them from the house to the car. They notice everything—the latest oil spill, the white feather in the bird's nest, and the dew in the spider web. They're often accused of not listening.

The penalty of success is to be bored by the attentions of people who formerly snubbed you.

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

We have become so inundated with information that the average person in the United States now reads daily the same number of words as is found in many a novel. Unfortunately, this form of reading is rarely continuous, sustained, or concentrated; rather, the average 34 gigabytes consumed by most of us represent one spasmodic burst of activity after another.

The psychologist Howard Gardner used the MIT scholar Seymour Papert's famous description of the child's "grasshopper mind"6 to describe the spasmodic way our digital young now typically "hop from point to point, distracted from the original task.

There is neither the time nor the impetus for the nurturing of a quiet eye, much less the memory of its harvests. Behind our screens, at work and at home, we have sutured the temporal segments of our days so as to switch our attention from one task or one source of stimulation to another. We cannot but be changed. And we are—

Shared attention, as Charles Taylor wrote, is the beginning of the great dance of language that joins one generation to the next, not forced attention. Knowing research about the development of literacy is a very good thing; knowing what to attend to in one's own child overrides everything I can ever say—or write—about any medium or any approach. There are so many things we all have

Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction . . . it returns us to a reckoning with time.2 —David Ulin

Just as I worry that in their overreliance on external sources of information, our young will not know what they do not know, I worry equally that we, their guides, do not realize the insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our attention to complex issues, the unsuspected diminishing of our ability to write, read, or think past 140 characters. We must all take stock of who we are as readers, writers, and thinkers.

Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focusing of our attention? What concerns me as

If attention in the young child, which is spasmodic and exploratory by nature, becomes all the more attenuated because of constant input, those of us who are researchers have to figure out the downstream effects on memory and other aspects of cognitive development.

Just as I worry that in their overreliance on external sources of information, our young will not know what they do not know, I worry equally that we, their guides, do not realize the insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our attention to complex issues, the unsuspected diminishing of our ability to write, read, or think past 140 characters.

But what if our capacity to perceive is actually decreasing because we are confronted with too much information, as the philosopher Josef Pieper once wrote?

You're not where you were, and you're not where you're going. You're here, so pay attention!