52 Quotes About Distraction

I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been. Raymond Carver

Is everybody in? Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin. The entertainment for this evening is not new, you've seen this entertainment through and through you have seen your birth, your life, your death....you may recall all the rest. Did you have a good world when you died? -enough to base a movie on?? Jim Morrison

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. . C.s. Lewis

As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements;’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.. . Henry David Thoreau

The saints, too, had wandering minds. The saints, too, had constantly to recall their constantly wandering mind-child home. They became saints because they continued to go after the little wanderer, like the Good Shepherd. Peter Kreeft

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say, –' Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children. Colson Whitehead

Gen. de Gaulle is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history." Georges Pompidou Mark Kurlansky

The British Army has a fine tradition of being so distracted by what it is currently up to it stubbornly refuses to look round the corner, let alone into the future. Patrick Hennessey

My insanity begged for a distraction. (Eric) Shannon A. Thompson

Only in sleep, where there's nothing but mind, can the mind clearly process all of the day's experiences/memories - without distraction. And, perhaps, only in sleep, where there's nothing but mind, can the mind truly understand the meaning of these memories, as well, and assimilate them with all the other memories you've accumulated over time, forming greater meanings - unintelligible in the light of day - building, perhaps, to some ultimate meaning at the culmination of life - unintelligible in the light of living. Mark X.

The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished. Paul Murray

Feeling its power, one Civil War paper trumpeted that Milton and Homer were for another age but for this one was the New York Herald. Harold Holzer

Distraction is reading written word and when I seek to make distraction I write the words I wish to be enveloped in. Anastasia Bolinder

Desire, if it is to be trusted, is to be inspired by a holy vocabulary. Jen Pollock Michel

This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours! William Wilberforce

I was quite possibly in the midst of losing my mind. I needed to get away from people until I figured out if I actually was losing my mind. Ransom Riggs

I’d find someone else. No distractions. Men get in the way of ambition. Plus, they laugh at you when you fail Rose Pressey

Fatigues and hardships serve to wean me more from the earth, and will make heaven sweeter. David Brainard

Weren’t you alwaysdistracted by expectation, as if every eventannounced a beloved? (Where can you find a placeto keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside yougoing and coming and often staying all night.)… Rainer Maria Rilke

The overpowering unimportance of this MAKES ME SPEECHLESS. — Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Reed Barbara W. Tuchman

A survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span had fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000. Timothy Egan

One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write. Philip Zaleski

I am trying not to philosophize. It is un-military. I think I can dig myself out of my academic mind and make an efficient officer. James Carl Nelson

Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere. Sherry Turkle

Are you placed where others are sitting down idly, doing nothing? Rise to the work with all your powers; and when the sweat stands upon your brow, and you are tempted to loiter, cry, "No, I cannot stop, for I am Christ's. If I were not purchased by blood, I might be like Issachar, crouching between two burdens; but I am Christ's, and cannot loiter. Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The phrase "having it all" has little to do with having what we want. Jennifer Senior

Potential was a red herring to plot a life of wandering curiosity. Nicholas Dawidoff

The author explores the result of endless choice. It is not only overload, but a profound loss of unity, solidity, and coherence in life. Os Guinness

After giving it some thought, I've decided to name my monkey mind Ricky Bobby. I was thinking about Latin names like Javier, but I don't want to make my jumping, distractable self sound mysterious and sexy. Ricky Bobby makes me laugh. A name like that seems silly, not strong. Just a goofy little thing that doesn't know what to do with its hands, likes to go fast, and loves tiny, infant, baby Jesus. Anna White

He closed the laptop. A sure sign I was about to receive his full attention. Ransom Riggs

To some people, employment is a distraction. To all entertainers, distraction is employment. Mokokoma Mokhonoana

He [Abram] believes that the PRESENT is the only real thing and everything else is an illusiona distraction Jennifer DeLucy

... answered his knock with a smile, a short one forced through because she was at heart a warm person, not given to the dark mood swings which now plagued her. John Grisham

Television was suppressing their freedom not to know. Rick Perlstein

Television news is akin to audible wallpaper. George F. Will

Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare - all that tripe and nonsense. 'Work! ' he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, 'work is no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. Work's simply a drug, that's all. It's humiliating that men shouldn't be able to live without drugs, soberly; it's humiliating that they shouldn't have the courage to see the world and themselves as they really are. They must intoxicate themselves with work. It's stupid. The gospel of work's just a gospel of stupidity and funk. Work may be prayer; but it's also hiding one's head in the sand, it's also making such a din and a dust that a man can't hear himself speak or see his own hand before his face. It's hiding yourself from yourself. No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big business men are such enthusiasts for work. Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important. If they stopped working, they'd realize that they simply weren't there at all, most of them. Just holes in the air, that's all. Holes with perhaps a rather nasty smell in them. Most Smilesian souls must smell rather nasty, I should think. No wonder they daren't stop working. They might find out what they really are, or rather aren't. It's a risk they haven't the courage to take. Aldous Huxley

In politics, nothing good ever comes from the unexpected. Chris Matthews

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand. Bill Bryson

Security is by far the city's predominant business. Ron Suskind

Eighteen pockets in one suit? I haven't the time. A.a. Milne

Grant made the perfect candidate, a war hero with indistinct views on most political issues. H.W. Brands

Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka. Flannery OConnor

Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster. Sarah Blake

Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere. Sherry Turkle

She had become so much more accustomed to hard work and opposition than to adulation that the only emotion she had felt had been one of acute discomfort. Margaret Landon

Tale-bearing emits a threefold poison; for it injures the teller, the hearer, and the person concerning whom the tale is told. Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Watching movies is my one distraction. Marilyn Manson