Quotes About Distraction

It's hard work to think away all those 200 people or 40 people, whatever the crew is, that are around behind the camera. To also think about, 'Whatever I'm doing now is going to be seen by a million people,' it doesn't really help my performance.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

I try to only read light things when I'm working on my books, and in the evenings I watch a lot of mindless TV. I have to break up the 'dark,' or I wouldn't be a very happy person.

Whenever we have fifteen free minutes, an hour or two, we have the habit of using our computers or cell phones, music, or conversations to forget and to run away from the reality of the elements that make up our beings.

When we feel suffering, we have the urge to run away from it and fill ourselves up with junk food, junk entertainment, anything to keep our mind off the pain that is there inside us.

When we feel suffering, we have the urge to run away from it and fill ourselves up with junk food, junk entertainment, anything to keep our mind off the pain that is there inside us. It doesn't work. We may succeed in numbing ourselves from it for a little while, but the suffering inside wants our attention and it will fester and churn away until it gets it.

Everything about everybody is nothing but diversion from death.

Anyone can bear a catastrophe, once it has occurred, by at least seeming to avoid it through keeping busy, no matter which work routine he forces himself into.

Satan is never better pleased, than when he sees Christians puzzled and perplexed about those things in religion, which are of no great consequence or importance.

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

The intentions as to reading, working, and learning, which he had so precisely formulated only a few minutes earlier, were suffering a curious collapse into a corner, he knew not how.

Back at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading. He feels the books beside him to find the one that is warm.

The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.

To feel stirring within you the wonderful and melancholy play of strange forces and to be aware that those others you yearn for are blithely inaccessible to all that moves you?what a pain is this! And yet! He stood there aloof and alone, staring hopelessly at a drawn blind and making, in his distraction, as though he could look out. But yet he was happy. For he lived. His heart was full...

The Need to Win When an archer is shooting for nothing He has all his skill. If he shoots for a brass buckle He is already nervous. If he shoots for a prize of gold He goes blind Or sees two targets – He is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, But the prize Divides him. He cares, He thinks more of winning Than of shooting – And the need to win Drains him of power.

There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.

You have got me walking up and down all day under those trees, saying to me over and over again, Solitude, solitude. And You have turned around and thrown the world in my lap. You have told me, Leave all things and follow me, and then You have tied half of New York to my foot like a ball and chain. You have got me kneeling behind that pillar with my mind making a noise like a bank. Is that contemplation?

Suppose that my poverty be a secret hunger for spiritual riches: suppose that by pretending to empty myself, pretending to be silent, I am really trying to cajole God into enriching me with some experience--what then? Then everything becomes a distraction.

To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is absolutely necessary if man is to remain human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless.

Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming - just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again.

Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping games, jerking off, streaming endless garbage-

Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by.

People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.

The current phone obsession is a disease," Chance said. "Everyone's gone mad, typing to themselves all day long like mindless robots.