Quotes About Distraction

Lord! haven't I seen you with the greatest authors in your hands, and don't I know how ready your attention is to wander when it's a book that asks for it, instead of a person?

Don't let me think—that is all I ask now, Marian—don't let me think.

His wife does not dress for him, only when he has gone away and is no longer in her mind; he sees her in a disheveled negligee, while all through the day he meets women powdered and primped and curled, whose charming knees and inviting frocks and encouraging smiles and aphrodisiac perfumes leave him hovering hourly over the abysses of disloyalty.

Dan slept throughout - but a man who sleeps with his head lying on a phone table can never really sleep with a clean conscience

Young folks and womens, they aint cluttered. They can listen. But a middle-year man like your paw and your uncle, they cant listen. They aint got time. They're too busy with facks.

The girl in 3.7 seemed engrossed in her phone. "What's she doing?" "Candy Crush Saga. Nondigital surveillance is weaponized boredom.

the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that postgeographical meta-country we increasingly call home.

Peter Bregman, a productivity guru and blogger for the Harvard Business Review, recommends a simple trick for dodging this fate. He advises us to set a timer that goes off once every hour, and when it beeps, we should ask ourselves, "Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?

The first problem of communication is getting people's attention.

As a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, so every mind divided among different studies is confused and weakened.

Sometimes seeing everything just gets in the way.

I think that the fact that a relationship becomes public is a bit of a bummer. Because it can distract from the real reason why you're together, which is that you just like each other.

I'm fairly certain that, because Belly was distracted and wound up linked with you instead of me, my own chemically enhanced ability wasn't strong enough to keep it open single-handedly.

He ignored the disturbing ripple and tried to focus on the gateway.

Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape -- I didn't read to learn, I was reading to read.

The truth is, when I'm immersed in a book I'm less aware of the pain in my unpredictable arms and legs.

The world divides between those who can watch television knowing there's an isolated jigsaw fragment lying on the floor and those who can't.

It seems to me now a shocking commentary on the press of our time that I pushed the hydrogen-bomb tests on Eniwetok right off the front pages. A tragic war was still raging in Korea, George VI had died and Britain had a new queen, sophisticated guided missiles were going off in New Mexico, Jonas Salk was working on a vaccine for infantile paralysis...Christine Jorgensen was on page one.

Just for a while": Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans. Join the Rat Race "just for a while." Concentrate on your career "just for a while." Move in with your girlfriend "just for a while." Find a bigger place, out in the burbs "just for a while." Lie down in that wooden box "just for a while.

6) The understanding that philosophers have of man is superficial: they are not able to fathom his depths, his despair, what is hidden in his craving for distraction and in the mood of boredom, which discloses more of man's reality than all his rational activities.

Multitasking? I can't even do two things at once. I can't even do one thing at once.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayadère of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising — only these stand a chance.