#preoccupation

To wait for hours to buy a train ticket or to see a doctor is accepted as a normal way of doing things. Privacy is not a great preoccupation, and this is a very crowded country. ↗

— Nancy Travis

#buy #country #crowded #doctor #doing

Forgiveness isn’t something I’m preoccupied with — turning the other cheek isn’t my trip. ↗

— Karl Lagerfeld

#designer #forgive #forgiveness #karl-lagerfeld #past

Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting. ↗

— James D. Watson

#been #breakthrough #exciting #possible #preoccupation

Europe has to address people's needs directly and reflect their priorities, not our own preoccupations. ↗

— Peter Mandelson

#directly #europe #needs #our #own

I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry. ↗

— Andrew Motion

#deal #events #going #great #great deal

Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn. ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#busyness #life #living #mind #preoccupation

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time. ↗

— Renata Adler

#bored #boredom #cruel #cruelty #great

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. ↗

— Graham Greene

#creative-process #daily-life #preoccupations #subconscious #superficiality

Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from. ↗

— Eric Hoffer

#came #drawn #god #impulse #our