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21 " Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange had argued for adults’ right to have sex with children – or rather by a slippery sleight of word, PIE inverted the imperative by arguing that children should have the right to have sex with adults. This group had been disbanded after the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, its leader, with some of its activists bunkered in Holland’s paedophile enclaves, only to re-appear over the parapets in the sex crime controversies of the 1990s. How recent it was, then, that paedophilia was fielded as one of the liberation movements, how many of those on the left and right of the political firmament, were – and still are – persuaded that sex with children is merely another case for individual freedom?Few people in Britain at the turn of the century publicly defend adults’ rights to sex with children. But some do, and they are to be found nesting in the coalition crusading against evidence of sexual suffering. They have learned from the 1970s, masked their intentions and diverted attention on to ‘the system’. Others may not have come out for paedophilia but they are apparently content to enter into political alliances with those who have. We believe that this makes their critique of survivors and their allies unreliable. Others genuinely believe in false memories, but may not be aware of the credentials of some of their advisors. "
― ,
22 " The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work. "
― Steven Pressfield , The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle
23 " Our interests are centered in ourselves. We are preoccupied with material things. Our supreme god is technology; our goddess is sex. Most of us are more interested in getting to the moon than in getting to heaven, more concerned about conquering space than about conquering ourselves. We are more dedicated to material security than to inner purity. We give much more thought to what we wear, what we eat, what we drink, and what we can do to relax than we give to what we are. This preoccupation with peripheral things applies to every area of our lives. "
― Billy Graham , Billy Graham in Quotes
24 " We spend enormous amounts of time and money on fad diets, expensive exercise machines, and health clubs. For many people, these things only demonstrate their preoccupation with the physical side of life . . . but even more important is taking care of our souls. "
25 " The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite—on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel—keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one...that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger—indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it—than it is a monumental distraction from hunger. "
― Caroline Knapp
26 " Jonah’s anger was not marked by outbursts of rage but by a quiet withdrawal from the company of others and a growing preoccupation with the events in his own life. "
― Colin S. Smith , Jonah: Navigating a God-Centered Life
27 " The border between personal and transpersonal experience is a complex region. It is a territory often filled with spiritual and religious views. Within psychology it was a significant preoccupation of William James, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and many others. But these margins may be seen in other ways as well. There is substantial evidence from psychological studies of personal space that we carry body boundaries of extended space around ourselves. These spatial extensions are not only personal. They may be felt by groups as well—in terms of shared “social” space, communal territories, or even national identities. "
― , Ecology and Experience: Reflections from a Human Ecological Perspective
28 " The tension between people is palpable, and the ideal of what it means to be and look American becomes a preoccupation to folks around the country, including me. "
― Raquel Cepeda , Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
29 " To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue. "
― John Howard Griffin
30 " One response was given by the innkeeper when Mary and Joseph wanted to find a room where the Child could be born. The innkeeper was not hostile; he was not opposed to them, but his inn was crowded; his hands were full; his mind was preoccupied. This§ is the answer that millions are giving today. Like a Bethlehem innkeeper, they cannot find room for Christ. All the accommodations in their hearts are already taken up by other crowding interests. Their response is not atheism. It is not defiance. It is preoccupation and the feeling of being able to get on reasonably well without Christianity. "
― Billy Graham
31 " But that wasn't the chief thing that bothered me: I couldn't reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin that, so far as I could tell, was never entirely absent from the monks' thoughts. I'd known a lot of fellows in the air corps. Of course they got drunk when they got a chance, and had a girl whenever they could and used foul language; we had one or two had hats: one fellow was arrested for passing rubber cheques and was sent to prison for six months; it wasn't altogether his fault; he'd never had any money before, and when he got more than he'd ever dreamt of having, it went to his head. I'd known had men in Paris and when I got back to Chicago I knew more, but for the most part their badness was due to heredity, which they couldn't help, or to their environment, which they didn't choose: I'm not sure that society wasn't more responsible for their crimes than they were. If I'd been God I couldn't have brought myself to condemn one of them, not even the worst, to eternal damnation. Father Esheim was broad-minded; he thought that hell was the deprivation of God's presence, but if that is such an intolerable punishment that it can justly be called hell, can one conceive that a good God can inflict it? After all, he created men, if he so created them that ti was possible for them to sin, it was because he willed it. If I trained a dog to fly at the throat of any stranger who came into by back yard, it wouldn't be fair to beat him when he did so.If an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did he create evil? The monks said, so that man by conquering the wickedness in him, by resisting temptation, by accepting pain and sorrow and misfortune as the trials sent by God to purify him, might at long last be made worthy to receive his grace. It seem to me like sending a fellow with a message to some place and just to make it harder for him you constructed a maze that he had to get through, then dug a moat that he had to swim and finally built a wall that he had to scale. I wasn't prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn't common sense. I didn't see why you shouldn't believe in a God who hadn't created the world, buyt had to make the best of the bad job he'd found, a being enormously better, wiser and greater than man, who strove with the evil he hadn't made and who might be hoped in the end to overcome it. But on the other hand I didn't see why you should. "
― W. Somerset Maugham , The Razor's Edge
32 " When you have succeeded in letting go of a trivial preoccupation or two, your awareness will begin to expand into the deeper sources of stress in your life, the bigger uncontrollable things that you have been at pains to control. "
― Linda Bender , Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
33 " It’s natural to think of one’s own life as a novel (or a movie or a play), and within that narrative we are always the central character. Thoughtful people try to overcome this compulsion, but they usually fail (in fact, trying makes it worse). In a commencement speech at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace argued that conquering the preoccupation with self is pretty much the whole objective of being alive — but if we are to believe Wallace succeeded at this goal, it must be the darkest success imaginable. "
― Chuck Klosterman
34 " Recipe for a WorryTake one pound morbid preoccupation and mix vigorously with one cup overactive imagination. In a separate bowl, add one part hypersensitivity to three parts increased hormone activity. Fold together and let stew for hours on end. "
35 " Distraction leaches the authenticity out of our communications. When we are not emotionally present, we are gliding over the surface of our interactions and we never tangle in the depths where the nuances of our skills are tested and refined. A medical professor describes the easy familiarity with which her digital-native resident students master medical electronic records—but is troubled by the fact that they enter data with their eyes focused on their digital devices, not on the patient in the room with them. Preoccupation with technology acts as a screen between the student and the patient’s real emotion, real fear, and real concern. It may also prevent these residents from noticing physical symptoms that the patient fails to mention. The easy busyness of medical record entry is a way to sidestep the more challenging dynamics of human connection. But experienced physicians know that interpersonal skills are essential to mastering the art and science of medical diagnosis. "
― , Relevance: Matter More
36 " There is no explaining the " pure" experience. There is only the completely unwarranted presupposition that others should others should somehow " understand" that it has taken place. but the judgement whether a " pure" rather than a secondary " experience" has actually occurred can, by definition, only be self-referential.&that would be in order if, simultaneously, there were not the presumption that something objectively meaningful about phenomenal reality had been illuminated.Or, putting it another way,the problem is not what James Joyce termed the " epiphany," the momentary glimpse of meaning experienced by an individual, but rather the refusal to define its existential " place" or recognize its explanatory limits....Insisting upon the absolute character of revelatory truth obviously generates a division between the saved & the damned.There arises the simultaneous desire to abolish blasphemy and bring the heathen into the light.Not every person in quest of the " pure experience," of course,is a religious fanatic or obsessed with issues of identity.Making existential sense of reality through the pure experience,feeling a sense of belonging, is a serious matter & a legitimate undertaking.But the more the preoccupation with the purity of the experience, it only follows,the more fanatical the believer. In political terms,therefore,the problem is less the lack of intensity in the lived life of the individual than the increasing attempts by individuals and groups to insist that their own,particular,deeply felt existential or religious or aesthetic experience should be privileged in the public realm.Indeed, this runs directly counter to the Enlightenment.... Different ideas have a different role in different spheres of social action.Subjectivity has a pivotal role to play in discussing existential or aesthetic experience while the universal subject is necessary understanding of citizenship or the rule of law.From such a perspective,indeed,the seemingly irresolvable conflict between subjectivity and the subject becomes illusory: it is instead a matter of what should assume primacy in what realm....From the standpoint of a socially constructed subjectivity,however, only members of a particular group can have the appropriate intuition or " experience," to make judgements about their culture or their politics...This stance now embraced by so many on the left,however, actually derives from arguments generated first by the Counter-Enlightenment & then the radical right during the Dreyfus Affair.These reactionaries, too, claimed that rather than introduce " grand narratives" or " totalizing ambitions" or " universal" ideas of justice, intellectuals should commit themselves to the particular groups with whose unique discourses and experiences they, as individuals, are intimately and existentially familiar.The " pure" -or less contaminated- experience of group members was seen as providing them a privileged insight into a particular form of oppression. Criticism from the " outsider" loses its value and questions concerning the adjudication of differences between groups are never faced,...Not every person who believes in the " pure experience" -again-was an anti-Semite or fascist.But it is interesting how the " pure experience," with its vaunted contempt for the " public" and its social apathy,can be manipulated in the realm of politics.Utopia doesn't appear only in the idea of a former " golden age" located somewhere in the past or the vision of future paradise...history has shown the danger of turning " reason" into an enemy and condemning universal ideals in the name of some parochial sense of " place" rooted in a particular community, Or, put another way, where power matters the " pure" experience is never quite so pure and no " place" is sacrosanct.Better to be a bit more modest when confronting social reality and begin the real work of specifying conditions under which each can most freely pursue his or her existential longing &find a place in the sun. "
37 " It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them. "
38 " It was [Hugh's] omnipresent fear that some woman might be foisted on him who would turn out to be an adventuress and would blackmail him. This preoccupation made it almost impossible for him to engage a secretary. "
― Anthony Powell ,
39 " In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art from, she became dangerous. "
― Toni Morrison , Sula
40 " Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from the other rooms into a state of vague ecstasy, while he contemplated the small sheet of water outside the window. It was that happy frame of mind into which his people could project themselves so easily - the mere absence of immediate unpleasant preoccupation could start it off, and a landscape which included the sea, a river, a fountain, or anything that occupied the eye without engaging the mind, was of use in sustaining it. It was the world behind the world, where reflection precludes the necessity for action, and the calm which all things seek in death appears briefly in the guise of contentment, the spirit at last persuaded that the still waters of perfection are reachable. "
― Paul Bowles , The Spider's House
