#attention

With respect to the first of these obstacles, it has often been made a matter of grave complaint against Political Economists, that they confine their attention to Wealth, and disregard all consideration of Happiness or Virtue. ↗

— Nassau William Senior

#attention #been #complaint #confine #consideration

At school, everything feels weird. No one looks at me or pays attention to me, no one says hi, no one asks how I am feeling, and everyone is so quite. It’s like I don’t even exist. ↗

— Abraham M. Alghanem

#life #school #life

What the hell do I have to do to get your attention? Do I need to get up there?” I throw an arm toward the stage. His eyes swell for just a second, in shock. He reaches forward to hold my hands, but he catches himself in time and instead folds them across his chest. “Believe me, you have my full attention. ↗

— K.A. Tucker

#k-a-tucker #kacey-cleary #kacey-trent #love #sweet

If only Sam could have stayed just like the Dog, she thought. A comforting friend without the complication of romantic interest.There had to be something she could do to completely discourage him, short of throwing up, or making herself totally unattractive. "I'm thirty-five," she said at last. ↗

— Garth Nix

#unwanted-attention #romantic

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#boredom #life #life

Particularly when you're dealing with very high ranking people, you know, you have to get their attention, they are used to, by their rank, of having their own way and doing their own thing and when it's necessary to all work together on something, sometimes you have to hit the mule between the eyes of the two by four to get its attention. ↗

— Norman Schwarzkopf

#between #dealing #doing #eyes #four

Americans are very easygoing people. If the added attention and great visibility that I have been able to generate can help open doors and expose more Chinese to American values and the American way of life, that is great. ↗

— Gary Locke

#added #american #american values #american way #attention

Growing up, my brother and I were begging for attention. ↗

— Jeremy London

#begging #brother #growing #growing up #i

I'm not coping very well with all the attention, if I'm honest. ↗

— Sienna Miller

#coping #honest #i #very #well

I have no ego investment in being on the air. I don't knock others for whom that kind of attention is like oxygen, but I don't miss anything about it. ↗

— Hugh Downs

#air #anything #attention #being #ego