“Cause all that it takes is a little reinvention
It’s easy to change if you give it your attention
All you gotta do
Is just believe you can be who you wanna be
Sincerely. . .
me.”
“You didn’t need a college degree to become one of the people who knew what was really going on. If you paid attention, you could pick things up on your own.”
“Unless a man is prepared to ask a woman to be his wife, what right has he to claim her exclusive attention? Unless she has been asked to marry him, why would a sensible woman promise any man her exclusive attention? If, when the time has come for a commitment, he is not man enough to ask her to marry him, she should give him no reason to presume that she belongs to him.”
“Music is a proud, temperamental mistress. Give her the time and attention she deserves, and she is yours. Slight her and there will come a day when you call and she will not answer.”
“They [parents] can resist the impulse to ‘prove’ their love by showering children with things they do not need and give them precious time and attention instead.”
“That’s death and life, you see. We all shine on. You just have to release your hearts, alert your senses, and pay attention. A leaf, a star, a song, a laugh. Notice the little things, because somebody is reaching out to you. Qualcuno ti ama. Somebody loves you.”
“There was something magic in their large and perfect eyes, something that made you want to pay attention to whatever they said, to protect them from any danger, to make them happy. They were so...pretty.”
“As his youngest child I had grown up blessed with special attentions. Now, more and more I found myself cut off from him. When I needed reassurance I would get it from Woody or Chizu, or from Mama, who had more of herself to give by this time.”
“What the younger generation didn’t understand was that the grass was greenest where it’s watered, which meant that both Frank and Amanda had to get out their hoses if they wanted to make things better. But Amanda hadn’t asked.”
“Let me tell ya. You gotta pay attention to signs. When life reaches out with a moment like this it’s a sin if you don’t reach back... I’m telling you.”
“One can ignore a poor shirtless wretch doing such labor, but none ignore a king sharing the load. Perhaps we should switch places more often. If a king is seen to assume the burden of the poorest of men, perhaps there will be those who will help him with his own load, so invisible, yet so daunting.”
“Then having lighted his pipe he took out his watch. He looked at it attentively; he made, perhaps, some mathematical calculation. At last he said, triumphantly:
‘Well done!’ James had steered them like a born sailor.”
“There was no real up-and-down structure, but merely a figure at the top and then everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn’t task-based so much as response-oriented—whatever captured the boss’s attention focused everybody’s attention.”
“One night as I was passing a tavern I saw through a lighted window some gentlemen fighting with billiard cues, and saw one of them thrown out of the window. At other times I should have felt very much disgusted, but I was in such a mood at the time, that I actually envied the gentleman thrown out of the window – and I envied him so much that I even went into the tavern and into the billiard-room. ‘Perhaps,’ I thought, ‘I’ll have a fight, too, and they’ll throw me out of the window.’ ”
“You must learn to distract your victims with a myriad of pleasant little rituals? thoughtful gifts tailored just for them, clothes and adornments designed to please them, gestures that show the time and attention you are paying them. Mesmerized by what they see, they will not notice what you are really up to.”
“Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have). As children, we wanted to monopolize the attention of a parent, to draw it away from other siblings. This sense of rivalry... makes people compete for the attention.”
“God does hear what we pray. You don’t need a megaphone or a million people to get His attention. But the point of prayer is not to get what we want. Prayer changes the person who prays.”
Sutra 3.1: “desa-bandhas cittasya dhârañâ”
Translation: Concentration is the process of holding or fixing the mind’s attention onto one object or place, and is the sixth of the eight rungs.
“Her pale blue eyes shuttled around, right and left, to see if Anthony was in sight. Not that it would make any difference if he was or wasn’t- he didn’t have to be near you to know what you were thinking. usually, though, unless he had his attention on somebody, he would be occupied with thoughts of his own.
But some things attracted his attention--you could never be sure just what.
‘This weather’s just fine,’ Mom said.
Lollop.”
“She was so sure, so present, so easy, so light and gold, while I was all gray and shadow. I was not ugly or monstrous. That might have been better. Monsters always command attention, if only for their freakishness. My parents would have wrung their hands and tried to make it up to me, as parents will with a handicapped or especially ugly child. Even Call, his nose too large for his small face, had a certain satisfactory ugliness.”
“After a few days of rain, the seedlings will push through the soil and unfold their tiny leaves. Two weeks later, if the rain is still good, we then carefully apply the first round of fertilizer, because each seedling requires love and attention like any living thing if it’s going to grow up strong.”
“Paul is saying that he has reached a place where his ego draws no more attention to itself than any other part of his body. He has reached the place where he is not thinking about himself anymore. When he does something wrong or something good, he does not connect it to himself any more.”
“After his mother left home, Haroun found that he couldn’t keep his mind on anything for very long, or, to be precise, for more than eleven minutes at a time. Rashid took him to a movie to cheer him up, but after exactly eleven minutes Haroun’s attention wandered, and when the film ended he had no idea how it all turned out, and had to ask Rashid if the good guys won in the end.”
“Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
“Just imagine for a day that you do not know anything, that what you believe could be completely false. Let go of your preconceptions and even your most cherished beliefs. Experiment. Force yourself to hold the opposite opinion or see the world through your enemy’s eyes. Listen to the people around you with more attentiveness. See everything as a source for education—even the most banal encounters. Imagine that the world is still full of mystery.”
“Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.”
“Behold, the fool saith, “Put not all thine eggs in the one basket” - which is but a matter of saying, “Scatter your money and your attention”; but the wise man saith, “Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET.”
“Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people’s weaknesses. Avoid being one of the mob who indulges in such pastimes. Your life is too short and you have important things to do. Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest. It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity. But there’s no need for that to happen if you determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap.”
“Come here, then. Let’s forget about all that old stuff, shall we. Come and give me a bit of attention.” The two women immediately did as he said, hurrying over to him where they kissed him and hugged him and then they quickly finished their letters.