Home > Topic > my attention
1 " Dimitri's voice snapped my attention back to him. " That's Adrian Ivashkov." He said the name the same way everyone else did. " Yeah, I know." " This is the second time I've seen you with him." " Yeah," I replied glibly. " We hang out sometimes." Dimitri arched an eyebrow, then jerked his head back toward where we'd come from. " You hang out in his room a lot?" Several retorts popped into my head, and then a golden one took precedence. " What happens between him and me is none of your business." I managed a tone very similar to the one he'd used on me when making a similar comment about him and Tasha. " Actually, as long as you're at the Academy, what you do is my business." " Not my personal life. You don't have any say in that. "
2 " And like an echo, God often uses the repetitive events and themes in daily life to get my attention and draw me closer to himself." - The Sacred Echo "
3 " So, what...in the meantime, you just...” He glanced at her then back at the road. “Deny yourself?”Em gave a half smile at the incredulity in his voice. Clearly it was a foreign concept to him. “It’s okay. I have a battery operated boyfriend awaiting my attention when I get home.”He shot her a quick, open-mouthed stare, his lips parted enticingly. He looked so stunned at her admission she couldn’t help but laugh.“Sorry, didn’t you know that women did that, too? Did I shock you?”“Not at all.” He recovered quickly, a big smile splitting his profile. “I’m just trying to decide which is sexier. Self-denial or self-abuse. "
― Amy Andrews , Playing the Player (Sydney Smoke Rugby, #3)
4 " I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes. "
― Annie Dillard
5 " It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things. "
― Sophia Amoruso , #Girlboss
6 " A second point that caught my attention was that the very persons who insist upon keeping religion and science separate are eager to use their science as a basis for pronouncements about religion. The literature of Darwinism is full of anti-theistic conclusions, such as that the universe was not designed and has no purpose, and that we humans are the product of blind natural processes that care nothing about us. What is more, these statements are not presented as personal opinions but as the logical implications of evolutionary sc "
7 " I approach the creation-evolution dispute not as a scientist but as a problem of law, which means among other things that I know something about the ways that words are used in arguments. What first drew my attention to the question was the way the rules of argument seemed to be structured to make it impossible to question whether what we are being told about evolution is really true. For example, the Academy's rule against negative argument automatically eliminates the possibility that science has not discovered how complex organisms could have developed. However wrong the current answer may be, it stands until a better answer arrives. It is as if a criminal defendant were not allowed to present an alibi unless he could also show who did commit the crime. "
― Phillip E. Johnson , Darwin on Trial
8 " I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to. "
― Helene Hanff , 84, Charing Cross Road
9 " To the eyes of the American soldiers who drove past, I looked no different from the women around me; and as I thought of it, who could say I was any different? If you no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree? " I am a peasant," I said to myself, " and not a geisha at all any longer." It was a frightening feeling to look at my hands and see their roughness. To draw my mind away from my fears, I turned my attention again to the truckloads of soldiers driving past. Weren't these the very American soldiers we'd been taught to hate, who had bombed our cities with such horrifying weapons? Now they rode through our neighborhood, throwing pieces of candy to the children. "
10 " After that, I became kind of fascinated by her and by what I guessed was her ability to hear music in the silence. Back then, I'd wanted to be able to do that, too. So I took to watching her play, and though I told myself the reason for my attention was because she was as dedicated a musician as I was and that she was cute, the truth was that I also wanted to understand what she heard in the silence. "
― Gayle Forman , Where She Went (If I Stay, #2)
11 " My two most unproductive days of the week have always been yesterday and tomorrow. Keeping that in mind, I try to focus majority of my attention on today. "
― Mark W Boyer
12 " It’s a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won’t accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won’t accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything. "
― Doris Lessing , The Golden Notebook
13 " I return my attention to the situation at hand and realize Reality—the impatient bitch—has made my decision for me. She does that a lot. You get busy planning your life, then it has the nerve to just go ahead and happen to you before you’re ready. Before you even get the chance to aim yourself right! "
― Karen Marie Moning , Iced (Fever, #6)
14 " When I am not paying attention to my children, they appear to desperately need it. When I am giving them my full attention, they seem just as happy to play by themselves. It is as though they need to be certain of my attention in order to play their own games and ignore me. "
― Sarah Ruhl
15 " I think the most important thing I do in my professional life today is delivering public, impermeable " no" s and sticking to them. I say no to people who prioritize being cool over being good. I say no to misogynists who want to weaponize my body against me. I say no to men who feel entitled to my attention and reverence, who treat everything the light touches as a resource for them to burn. I say no to religious zealots who insist that I am less important than an embryo. I say no to my own instinct to stay quiet. "
16 " This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed. "
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Breakfast of Champions
17 " In situations where I feel unclear or I do not know what to say or do, I turn my attention within myself. Then I listen to what my intuition and to what Existence within myself wants in this moment. Through listening within in this way, an answer often comes in the form of a creative and authentic impulse to say or do something or simply being silent until Existence is ready to respond. "
― Swami Dhyan Giten , Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
18 " My emotional state is determined by where my attention goes. "
― Elizabeth Grace Saunders , The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment: Achieve More Success with Less Stress: Foreword by Cal Newport, Author of So Good They Can't Ignore You
19 " Since the future's so iffy, I'll turn my attention to the past. "
― Manil Suri , The City of Devi (The Hindu Gods, #3)
20 " I have always had the capacity to go within myself and to discover the silence within, the inner meditative quality, the inner source of love and truth – the inner language of silence.Now I also notice that this silence is going deeper, and that I go beyond the ego and disappear into the silence.First this brought up fear, but now I am enjoying this meditation of disappering into the silence and to be nobody. I have started experimenting with this phenomenon to understand how to consciously go beyond the ego: yesterday when I took a cofee at a restaurant, I consciously turned my attention within and disappeared into the silence, which was like finding an inner source of bliss. In aloneness, I experiment with being consciously alone as a door to be egoless. In conscious aloneness, the ego can not function. In aloneness, your are not. When I am walking, I consciously experiment with being with Existence without having the mind constantly commenting. I try to just be wordlessly with the people and situations that I meet on my walk. When I can just be with Existence, it opens the door to be one with the Whole. "
― Swami Dhyan Giten
