Quotes About Absorption

a high degree of narrative transportation impairs one's critical facilities.

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.

There's something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can 'forget yourself' and absorb yourself, in a book, say.

Prayerful paying attention is not scrunching up our willpower and tightening our focus, but simply opening our self to what we encounter. This makes it much more an act of release than effort. We release any attempt to control attention and instead allow it to be absorbed by our present experience.

Real readers poison themselves with words. They close each book as though climbing, reborn, from a tomb.

When I read, the words on the page replace the voice in my head and I cease, for a little while, to be me, or at least to be so painfully aware of being me.

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

a good book teaches the reader how to read it.

Beg of God the removal of envy, that God may deliver you from externals, and bestow upon you an inward occupation, which will absorb you so that your attention is not drawn away.

He prays well who is so absorbed with God that he does not know he is praying.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet - if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while I'm doing other things, which is not a good idea.

There is no happiness. There is only concentration.

Happy be the reader plunged into her book who forgot the world and whom world forgot.

Passion focuses your mind to one thing that you are doing and leaves no space for something else to enter" - Ashutosh in the book "Songs of the Mist

I must absorb everything while I'm still singing and step onto the stages of my many homes, and look out at the familiar surroundings, at the people who have come to hear me, to hear music.

Honor the words that enter and attach to your brain.

I love libraries. Everybody there is serious and focused even if they are not absorbing or learning anything better

What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.

Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.

If you are anxious, you can't learn. It's like dropping seeds on concrete. With a quiet mind, people take things in.

I love really long books because it feels like you are diving into a pool for a very long time.:)

The best tourist is one without a camera.

Have you noticed how we are presented with the same lessons, over and over and over, before a tipping point is reached? The lessons we need to learn circle round us, closing in, until finally we are ready to take them in. Take them in. Those are the words that matter, because until I had embodied the lessons I was supposed to learn, absorbed them into the warp and woof of my being, they didn't "take"; they remained a head trip and didn't lead to changes in my behavior.