Quotes about Attention

When I was a crusade director in British Columbia, all of our meetings were at 9:03. Somebody said 'That's ridiculous. Why did you do that?' It's because you remember it. You've never been to another 9:03 meeting.

Thus we are sucked away into the future—and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

The mind tends to dart from one thing to another, like a monkey swinging from branch to branch without stopping to rest.

Doing things with mindfulness means you perform each action with clear awareness of what's happening and of what you're doing in the present moment, and you feel happy as you do it. Mindfulness is the capacity to shine the light of awareness onto what's going on here and now. Mindfulness is the heart of meditation practice.

You must do whatever is necessary to be able to do this: recognize the presence of the person you love several times each day.

Silence is not broken by speech, but by the anxiety to be heard.

Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.

if the scriptures don't sometimes pierce us like a sword, we're not paying close enough attention.

Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.

No man ever listened himself out of a job.

The few exiles who returned to the hospital were received with much less fanfare, because it was unwise to attract attention. This was the tacit slogan throughout the country: don't provoke the military, so as to pretend the recent past was buried and in the process of being forgotten.

The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.