Quotes About Distraction

But instead she freezes. She looks away, as if she can ignore her way out of it.

So I'd like to remain at that one delicate remove, so you can get to know me without the distraction of other people's noise.

There's only so long that you can stare at a wall before you feel like an idiot.

It's hardest when I'm by a computer. Such a brutal portal.

It's hard to think of such things when you are busy dreaming or loving or screwing. The context falls away.

Because we're gonna get so interested in entertainment that we're not gonna want to do the work that generates the income that buys the products that pays for the advertising that disseminates the entertainment.

Entertainment's chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can't tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise.

In the 1960 campaign, Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Adlai Stevenson, who already lost twice as the party's presidential nominee, He has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality, a certain frivolity, distractedness, over-interest in words and phrases.

It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn't conciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them.

Fly enough, and you learn to go brain-dead when you have to. It's sort of like time travel. One minute you're bending to unlace your shoes,and the next thing you know you're paying fourteen dollars for a fruit cup, wondering, How did I get here?

It really is torture to sit around the house and write all day. I'm thinking it might motivate me to finish the book faster, the thought that after it's finished I can return to housecleaning. The

Hugh claims the reason I've never seen one is that I'm not perceptive enough. This is his way of telling me that I'm self-centered, suggesting that if I weren't so concerned about, for example, meeting my daily Fitbit goal, I'd realize there's a six-hundred-year-old milkmaid living in our silverware drawer.

isn't that technology's job? To lighten our burden? To broaden our horizons? To make it possible to talk to your attorney and listen to a Styx album and check the obituaries in the town where your parents continue to live and videotape a race riot and send a text message and stun someone into submission all at the same time?

Dad doesn't pay attention when you talk to him, so Paul's taken to throwing the term IRS into his sentences. Then it's suddenly: "Hold on a second, what did you say?

What had we talked about and why hadn't I paid attention?

Death by Trivial Pursuits

Keep busy, Granny Sugars used to say, even if with poker, fighting, and fast cars, because idleness will get you in worse trouble.

The notion that too much information can be a distraction is off the mark. The quantity of information is irrelevant; it is the relevance of any quantity that matters.

My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.

There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.

I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

She loves to make a fuss, but she is rarely very attached to the fuss she makes.