Distraction Quotes

“Creating chaos provides excitement for some people, especially those who are uneasy with silence, those who distract themselves from their own problems by focusing outward, those who feel empty inside and need to fill themselves up with activity, and those who were raised in an environment in which harmony and peace were unknown.”
― Beverly Engel, The Emotionally Abusive Relationship: How to Stop Being Abused and How to Stop Abusing

“There is never a time when new distraction will not show up; we sow them, so several will grow from the same seed.”
― Seneca

“Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Ellington Feint was a line in my mind running right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days. She was an axis, and at that moment and for many moments afterward, my entire world revolved around her.”
― Lemony Snicket, Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?

“The overpowering unimportance of this MAKES ME SPEECHLESS. – Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Reed”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

“...shiny trinkets and frivolous spending make people forget what world they're living in.”
― Beth Lewis, The Wolf Road

“Idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Samuel FB Morse's SECOND question over the telegraph was, "Have you any news?”
― Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion

“If it was bliss to be alive, to hunt was rapture.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

“Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

“Don't search for answers. I felt like I was always searching. Literally -- when I felt depressed I'd wander online, pressing links, looking for something that would make me feel better. I'd surf from friends' photos to strangers' blog posts about how to apply makeup, to the flight message board, to Googling Will for the hundredth time--and feel worse.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories

“Any journalist who holds the office writes in a straitjacket.”
― Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion

“Once art served to educate and edify, now it distracts and amuses.”
― James Rozoff

“Being self-owned is a state of mind.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“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, The Mark and the Void

“Sometimes I think it is because we remember when we could smoke in pubs, and that we pull our phones out together as once we pulled out our cigarette packets. But probably it’s because we are easily bored.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“I needed something to distract me-anything far away from my parents’ drama-just for a second. And when I saw my chance I didn’t stop to think about how much I’d regret it later. An opportunity sat on the bar stool beside me, and I lunged at it. Literally.
I kissed Wesley Rush.
One second his hand lay on my shoulder, and his gray eyes rested, for once, on my face, and the next my mouth was on his. My lips were fierce with bottled emotion, and he seemed to tense, his body frozen in shock. That didn’t last very long. An instant later, he returned the aggression, his hands flying to my sides and pulling me toward him. It felt like a battle between our mouths. My hands clawed into his curly hair, tugging it way harder than necessary, and his fingertips dug into my waist.
It worked better than punching someone would have. Not only did it help me release the agonizing pressure, but it definitely distracted me. I mean, it’s hard to think about your dad when you’re making out with somebody.
And as disturbing as it sounds, Wesley was a really good kisser. He leaned into me, and I tugged at him so hard that he nearly fell off his bar stool. In that moment, we just couldn’t get close enough to each other. Our separate seats seemed like they were miles apart.
All of my thoughts vanished, and I became a sort of physical being. Emotions disappeared. Nothing existed but our bodies, and our warring lips were at the center of everything. It was bliss! It was amazing not to think.
Nothing! Nothing… until he screwed it up.”
― Kody Keplinger, The DUFF: Designated Ugly Fat Friend

“I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: "Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him." And they cried out in a great voice: "He made us." CS Lewis”
― Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

“Like all great readers, he could create for himself a "wall of stillness".”
― Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

“The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“Desire, if it is to be trusted, is to be inspired by a holy vocabulary.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“The promise of a social gospel was for Luther an irrelevant and ultimately irrelevant and ultimately cruel delusion.”
― Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation

“Unbelief is a master carpenter at cross-making.”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version

“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, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion

“If thou rememberest that thou art going to heaven, thou wilt not sleep on the road. If thou thinkest that hell is behind thee, and the devil pursuing thee, thou wilt not loiter.”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version

“Gen. de Gaulle is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history." Georges Pompidou”
― Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World

“Our moral frailty is a strange consolation.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“The confusion created by mode of fictitious imagery, staged to produce a perceived idea of character or life, does only that - confuses.”
― Nicole Bonomi

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