Distraction Quotes

“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, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.”
― Hilary Mantel

“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, An American Prayer

“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“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, The Weight of Glory

“Well, hell yeah! I’m gonna kick your ass, too!”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Not this time you’re not. I have a new superpower.”
He laughed. “And what’s that? Harsh language?”
I leaned over to kiss his neck once, and then ran my tongue up to his ear, kissing his earlobe. He froze in place.
“Distraction,” I breathed into his ear.
He grabbed my arms and flipped me onto my back. “You’re going to miss another class.”
― Jamie McGuire, Beautiful Disaster

“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, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Answer me, James!” Will shouted. “Why have you blocked this door? I demand to know what’s going on!”
“James isn’t here!” Matthew called, moving closer to him. “Go away!”
James looked at Matthew, puzzled. “Really?”
“I heard breaking glass!” Will called.
“I was practicing fighting moves!” Matthew answered.
“In the ballroom?”
“We’re trying to distract Thomas! It’s been a very emotional day!” Matthew shouted back.
“What?” Will’s voice was incredulous.
“Don’t you blame this on me!” Thomas whispered.”
― Cassandra Clare, Chain of Gold

“The soul is "torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“weren’t you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)…”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“They say you don’t get over someone until you find someone or something better. As humans, we don’t deal well with emptiness. Any empty space must be filled. Immediately. The pain of emptiness is too strong. It compels the victim to fill that place. A single moment with that empty spot causes excruciating pain. That’s why we run from distraction to distraction—and from attachment to attachment.”
― Yasmin Mogahed

“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, Prayer for Beginners

“It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“I needed something--the distraction of another life--to alleviate fear.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park

“However entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your mind from another subject of almost equal importance?”
― Ernest Bramah, Kai Lung's Golden Hours

“INTEREST. Here is the key to the whole thing. If and when you are truly interested in what you are doing, or are about to do, then you will center your attention on it with little or no effort, and almost irrespective of the attendant conditions.”
― Ralph Alfred Habas, The Art of Self-Control

“Are you going to distract me by playing footsie?"
"Absolutely, princess," he says with a wink.
"Then I won't remember a thing."
"It's a samurai training technique," he teases, spinning the test prep book toward him. "I distract you as much as possible right now." He slides the book into his lap. "And you'll learn how to test through anything.”
― Tera Lynn Childs, Fins Are Forever

“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, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“A person who is another man's slave is better than one who is a slave to lust.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Procrasdemon is fighting hard to feed off of distractions and pleasures.”
― Neeraj Agnihotri, Procrasdemon - The Artist's Guide to Liberation from Procrastination

“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

“People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there's always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness.
The black and the black and the black.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

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

“I’d find someone else. No distractions. Men get in the way of ambition. Plus, they laugh at you when you fail”
― Rose Pressey, Flip That Haunted House

“At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“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, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Walden / The Maine Woods / Cape Cod

“In a strange way, I envied the quality of Morrie's time even as I lamented its diminishing supply. Why did we bother with all the distractions we did? .. give up days and weeks of our lives, addicted to someone else's drama.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

“If our state were really happy, we should not need to take our minds off it in order to make ourselves happy.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“He [Abram] believes that the PRESENT is the only real thing and everything else is an illusion
a distraction”
― Jennifer DeLucy, Seers of Light

“To invent fables about a world "other" than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has gained the upper hand in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of "another," a "better" life.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols