Quotes About Distraction

Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn't look up. Well, maybe once.

For Satan finds some mischief stillFor idle hands to do.

Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.

Sometimes I closed my eyes hard to avoid thinking, but the eye of the mind refused to be closed and continued to plague me with images.

How well I would write if I were not here!

You know you are somewhat impulsive, but you have learned to control yourself. The thing that most exasperates you is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous, the aleatory, the random, in things and in human actions - carelessness, approximation, imprecision, whether your own or others'. In such instances your dominant passion is the impatience to erase the disturbing effects of that arbitrariness or distraction, to re-establish the normal course of events.

She's there every day,' the writer says. 'Every time I'm about to sit down at my desk I feel the need to look at her. Who knows what she's reading? I know it isn't a book of mine, and instinctively I suffer at the thought, I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads. I never tire of watching her: she seems to live in a sphere suspended in another time and another space.

But in essence they had both remained in the era of the Wars of Succession, she with artillery in her head, he with genealogical trees; she who dreamed for us children a rank in an army, it didn't matter which, he who saw us instead married to some grand duchess elector of the empire . . . Despite all this, they were excellent parents, but so distracted that the two of us were left to grow up almost on our own.

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

In Samuel's day the people were distracted by the form of government they saw in their neighboring nations and decided that they, too, should have a king. In generation after generation the perceived prosperity of such neighbors distracted Israel from the Lord God, making them wonder if Baal might be better. Thus envy lent its power to distraction.

Haggai preached to a people with whom we might secretly sympathize: they were so preoccupied with paneling their own homes that they forgot that the house of the Lord was in ruins. All of which is to say, distraction comes easily, in many forms, and it happens to the nicest people.

Happiness is distraction from the human tragedy.

The Government, Church and television keep the average man so mired in petty concerns that he can no longer discern which battles are worth fighting for.

Procrastination, the thief of time, is one of the devil's most potent weapons for defrauding us of eternal heritage. The

Happiness in reality consists only in rest, and not in being stirred up. This instinct conflicts with the drive to diversion, and we develop the confused idea that leads people to aim at rest through excitement.

He was too busy checking out and checking in, making and breaking plans, buying and losing cell phones, playing computer games and pool, looking at stock quotes, and living the chaotic life that effectively took up all his energy and time.

They're so busy playing, they've taken their eyes off the board

Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs, tossing grass up to heaven—as a distraction, not a prayer. That's not humility you see on our long final journeys it's procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down. — Dan Chiasson, from "The Elephant," Natural History . (Knopf; First edition. edition October 11, 2005)

Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance.

now that all writers everywhere are contractually obligated to blog and tweet all day long, who has time to work on a book?

An artist on Esperance had once said to me, "Having sex or a domestic quarrel with the house monitors on is like undressing in front of a dog or cat ... it gives you pause the first time, and then you forget about it.

I never quite toed the line. I was a bit disruptive. All my early school reports from the age of 5 were 'Daniel must learn not to distract others.' And now, that's what I do for a living.

Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.

It's not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled. Start to subtract sevens successively from 100 and, if you keep your focus on the task, your chatter zone goes quiet.