Quotes About Attention

hypertext readers often "could not remember what they had and had not read.

We were on Barrow Street now. "Who is the man with the scar?" I said. She shot me a glance, and her face hardened. "You saw him?" "How could I miss? He was the real center of attention. Didn't you go to the opening at all?" "No" She said. "And just because you saw him doesn't mean he was there.

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention

What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

The internet, as its proponents rightly remind us, makes for variety and convenience; it does not force anything upon you. Only it turns out it doesn't feel like that at all. We don't feel as if we had freely chosen our online practices. We feel instead that they are habits we have helplessly picked up or that history has enforced, that we are not distributing our attention as we intend or even like to

After 'Skins' I became mildly famous, which was a bit of a disaster.

That night Holmes awoke in a high fever and was delirious. As Freud and I sat by his bedside, each restraining the movement of his hands, he babbled of oysters overrunning the world and similar nonsense.* Freud listened with the greatest attention. "Is he fond of oysters?" he demanded of me during a quiet interval. I shrugged, too confused to answer accurately.

By thinking ahead of the present position, the mind is building up a substantial fear of the future, while the physiological and biomechanical processes of the body, untended by the conscious mind here at mile six, begin to break down because of the lack of attention. When

But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It's a mistake of emphasis.

That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.

Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.

something. "Mum," perhaps. Everyone is looking at her. Sixty people have turned to stare. Perhaps they'd

Buddy, you've been warned.

The celebrity and the totalitarian share a desire to have their faces in every newspaper and on every television screen.

Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter because nobody listens.

Elvis Presley exhibited all the classic symptoms of those driven to self-destruction by too much fame and medication: short attention span, an egocentric, chronically addictive personality, bad taste in friends and horrendous eating habits. He was also stupid.

But I'm not saying anything because I've just noticed the brick. Or rather the lack of brick. Of course, some of the dark shapes on the floor probably are bricks, but they don't look like my brick. The one that can be up against the door. But isn't.

She would be glad not to attend Edwin. She had her father's hair, more so every day. When her uncle was thinking of power and dynasty, it was best not to come to his attention. And she had a lot to think about.

Hild, always visible, always watched, settled an attentive look on her face and drifted away into the music still cycling through her head. Cool, clear, endless as the sky. Perhaps it would help with any cleansing to come.

One had to sit still and really quiet to really see, really hear.

Always know what they like, her mother said. They will love you for it.

She looked at me with the same concentration she had directed at the painting. I felt her gaze on the bones, the cant of my eyebrows; weighing the line of jaw and length of neck; noting colour and shadow.

Cei called more taunts, but she was smelling the wind and no longer listening.

His eyes were hooked so deep in their sockets she could not tell at first what colour they were. But she was not looking hard, because she had eyes only for the sword at this side, which drew her so strongly she had to use half her attention to not reach out to the silvery hilt.