Quotes About Distraction

How seldom we notice rooftops; how easily our eyes are drawn to the more flamboyant attractions of a Roman temple or Renaissance church.

Still, though reading absorbed her, what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.

self-mastery is the goal of life, and controlling, bullying, or needing to fix others is a distraction from our true purpose.

Invisibly, almost without notice, we are losing ourselves. We are losing our ability to know who we are and what is important to us. We are creating a global machine in which each of us is a mindless and reflexive cog, relentlessly driven by the speed, noise, and artificial urgency of the wired world.

Eating was something to do to pass the time.

But our desks were never meant to be our altars.

It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.

People look at you and forget about things.

It's hard to think about nothing. I've tried it. You end up thinking about everything and getting stressed out. It's best to just think of one thing. A good thing.

Brandt and a couch-or worse, an empty master bedroom-were a very bad combo. He morphed from vaguely risque fling to bad-boy octopus man whenever he was in the vicinity of any marginally promising flat surface.

Why was he here? Why was he always, always, always around? Didn't he have a life? Didn't he have anything better to do?

The secret to surviving heartbreak is finding more pressing drama.

How am I supposed to save the universe with all this noise?!

Equally important is the effect of Last Days thinking on questions of world environmental damage. If the Last Days are coming, it is a profane distraction to bother with problems of pollution or exhaustion of natural resources, which in any case have been supplied in God's providence for humans to use. Hence the Christian Right's long-standing lack of interest in a matter which may bring the Last Days on human civilization, but not in the manner it anticipates.

The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. The person who comes into a fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion, no matter how spiritual this diversion may appear. He is really not seeking community at all, but only distraction which will allow him to forget his loneliness for a brief time, the very alienation that creates the deadly isolation of man.

For us, books have turned into fast food, to be consumed in the gaps between one bout of relentless living and the next. Airports, subways, maybe half an hour at bedtime, maybe something with the office sandwich, isn't really ideal.

Slaves to our media delivery devices, we are ever available to this vague, demanding elsewhere, and our ability to experience the "now" is dissolving.

They covered their walls with beautiful paintings for the same reason they drank—to distract themselves from the abyss.

Her dissertation on Dutch women painters of the Golden Age sits unfinished in her apartment, a half-typed sheet of paper mildewing in the mouth of a Remington. It's been months since she worked on it and she sometimes finds herself staring at the machine's bullnose profile or the chrome-plated carriage return, thinking: Remington also makes rifles.

How hard it can be to keep an eye on what's important, not be distracted by confusing patterns. Better to get out of the shadows . .

I've learned that if I stay busy, especially by helping others, I don't think about my pain. In an odd way, my pain is its own therapy. I intend to go on until I can't go anymore.

Giorgio cannot leave a bottle undrunk or an attractive woman unfucked, and those activities tend to get in the way of revolution.

Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.

The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.