Quotes About Distraction

Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.

I have spent less time thinking about my husband than thinking about lunch.

Satan had made it his aim to distract you from who you really are and what the purpose of your life really is. It is his focused objective to lure you out of the path of strength, life, and authority and into a course of intentional destruction.

Overall, books and art were a safer escape from reality than sleep.

We live in a largely addictive society that continues to reinforce the defenses we learned as children; this reinforcement comes in the form of a negative social pressure to soothe ourselves, to try to obtain instant gratification. . . Many people who suffered deprivation in childhood continue to accept substitute gratifications in the forms of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, television, video games, overwork, and other activities that distract them from experiencing their real lives.

Sure, they all have iPods, smartphones, whatever. Generally speaking, it's in our own best interest to keep some kind of electronic device in their hands. Otherwise they might talk to us.

Compulsive calmness indeed. When I was quitting smoking, I did this sort of thing all the time: jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, needlepoint, knitting, solitaire. They are all forms of self-hypnosis, I think, and they make me dreamy and blank.

Her feet tingled. One whole hour to forget about the leaky kitchen sink, her father's retirement party, and her mother's relentless questions about it. She closed her eyes. One whole hour to completely unwind and indulge her thoughts in something beside caterers, plumbers, and homicide cases.

Honestly? I think I was bored, Roxy. I think I was bored and I was having problems with my husband, I was filled with anger and resentment, with this low-level rage, and your mum came along with her stories that made my problems pale in comparison and I think it just stopped me focusing on the shit in my own life. That's all it was. A distraction.

It scares me sometimes how much room in my tiny little brain is taken up by things like the name of Liz Hurley's new boyfriend.

Nothing seems to me so likely to make people unhappy in themselves and at variance with others as the habit of killing time.

You watch enough TV, and very soon the inside of your head has become a vast, arid plain, across which you cannot detect the passage of a thought.

Your email inbox is a bit like a Las Vegas roulette machine. You know, you just check it and check it, and every once in a while there's some juicy little tidbit of reward, like the three quarters that pop down on a one-armed bandit. And that keeps you coming back for more.

Las Vegas is about distraction.

I think we live in delusional times, whether it's with a great ability to totally distract ourselves with technology, or with speed and the velocity of life.

But I find the best things I do, I do when I'm trying to avoid doing something else I'm supposed to be doing. You know, you're working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance.

When you can't do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

For most of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

There's always so much music around me now, it seems like everything has to be something with music, so in my spare time I try not to listen to anything. It's so hard for me to listen to something without trying to see a benefit in it: 'Maybe I'll make my own version of that track or maybe I'll do this or that.'

It was clear to me that it wouldn't matter what I did - they would never truly appreciate me or learn what I had to offer. They were far beyond fickle - they were insensible, like kittens,predatory little things, distracted by the first bit of string or shiny bauble that rolled across the floor, and nothing I could ever say or do could possibly make any kind of dent in their willful ignorance.

We even had dessert, which seemed to me to be pushing the distract-them-with-food ploy a little far, particularly since neither Deborah nor I was at all distracted. But it was quite good food, so it would have been barbaric of me to complain.

a man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches.

And a man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches.

Your most scarce resource is focus.