“Anything irreversible should be granted the ‘everything’ of our attention.”

“There is a wisdom, a sort of grace, in just noticing things.”

“Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness and the happiness of others.”

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. (21)”

“When you start giving, instead of getting, you make a difference… You can always give a warm smile, a sincere hello, a positive vibe… your concern, your attention, your time, your love, and kindness to those around you.”

“When you start giving, instead of getting, you make a difference. You can always give a warm smile, a sincere hello, a positive vibe… your attention, your time, your love, and kindness to those around you.”

“The more attention you give to your loved ones, the less affection you recieve from them.”

“Once again, we are reminded that awakening, or enlightenment is not the property of Buddhism, any more than Truth is the property of Christianity. Neither the Buddha nor the Christ belongs exclusively to the communities that were founded in their names. They belong to all people of goodwill, all who are attentive to the secret which lives in the depths of their breath and their consciousness. (14)”

“Drosophila,” I said, remembering the word.“What?” Lily asked.“Why do girls always fall for guys with the at ention span of drosophila?”“What?”“Fruit flies. Guys with the attention span of fruit flies.”“Because they’re hot?”“This,” I told her, “is not the time for being truthful.”

“If you feel obsessed to prove something to the world, then you’d need world attention to be able to prove it.”

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”

“It’s not at all hard to understand a person; it’s only hard to listen without bias.”

“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.”

“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.”

“I don’t judge people. It blurs out the center of my attention,my focus, myself.”