Distract Quotes & Sayings

The things we think we want are often substitutes for what we really want, and the pleasures we seek are less than the joy that they distract us from. — Charles Eisenstein

I like the adrenaline of live performance, whatever that is, appearing in front of an audience of any kind, whether it's one or a hundred or a thousand. It gives you a buzz of adrenaline, its exciting. The thing about that is that you want to make those nerves work for you in terms of an energy that's appropriate for the part and the performance, and not to distract the people who are watching so that they become nervous for you. — Jared Harris

My solo travels in Paris have brought many perfect hours of being alone but not a moment of loneliness. People who depend on other people are often in hiding from themselves. Two and a quarter million people live in the City of Light: you will see many of them and you will pass them in the street, but when you see Notre Dame after dark and walk home and perhaps stop to have a drink in the Marais, you can feel that the only thing that is missing from your experience is the common dependence on someone to distract your attention. You are living without it: you are on vacation. — Andrew O'Hagan

[Amy Carmichael's] great longing was to have a "single eye" for the glory of God. Whatever might blur the vision God had give her of His work, whatever could distract or deceive or tempt other to seek anything but the Lord Jesus Himself she tried to eliminate. — Elisabeth Elliot

Now, now, hear me out," Hamish went on. "We don't have to kidnap Garrett. Not if we kidnap the buyer."
"Or distract him," Angus added.
"Like the Bulgari job," Hamish said.
"You mean the job that landed half the DiMarco family in a South African prison?" Kat said.
Angus shrugged. "Nobody said it was perfect. — Ally Carter

When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself. — Dani Shapiro

So I had nothing to distract me from my books and their other worlds that swallowed me whole, from Narnia to the Wisconsin woods, from a small town in Sweden to the red earth of Prince Edward Island. Nothing and no one interested me as much as my books. — Luisa Weiss

If you fear looking at your true self, you'll find many ways to distract yourself from it. Busyness, drama, and addictions are ways of avoiding facing yourself. To find the peace you seek, stop running and just he. Get to know who you really are. Remember the wholeness you felt before you joined the rush to nowhere. Then you'll recognize yourself through the eyes of love, and everything will be different. — Alan Cohen

Avoid all refined speculations; confine yourself to simple reflections, and recur to them frequently. Those who pass too rapidly from one truth to another feed their curiosity and restlessness; they even distract their intellect with too great a multiplicity of views. Give every truth time to send down deep root into the heart. — Francois Fenelon

I give money for church organs in the hope the organ music will distract the congregation's attention from the rest of the service. — Andrew Carnegie

But until that happens -- and however brief a life, it will take a while -- there is a terrible, hateful interlude that belongs to us alone, and during which we have no alternative but to cope with what we have done or omitted to do and to distract or placate our feelings of guilt, and sometimes the only way of achieving this is to increase that guilt, to heap up new guilt to cover the old, to overshadow or blur or minimize it, until finally all guilt has passed and there isn't a soul in the world who can remember what we did, no quick, wicked tongue to talk about it, not even a tremulous finger to point us out as having been the cause of anything. — Javier Marias

New Rule: Conspiracy theorists who are claiming that we didn't really kill Bin Laden must be reminded that they didn't think he did the crime in the first place. Come on, nutjobs, keep your bullshit straight: The towers were brought down in a controlled demolition by George W. Bush to distract attention from Hawaii, where CIA operatives were planting phony birth records so that a Kenyan named Barack Obama could someday rise to power and pretend to take out the guy we pretended took out the Towers. And I know that's true because I just got it in an e-mail from Trump. — Bill Maher

I think by the time I left Egypt, there was about like 400 accusations against me in the drawer of the public persecutor office. It's a way for them to exhaust you, to push you, to put you under pressure, to distract you. — Bassem Youssef

They covered their walls with beautiful paintings for the same reason they drank - to distract themselves from the abyss. — Dominic Smith

I started playing poker in 2003 during my pregnancy, to distract myself from my awful morning sickness. For months all I did was cry and play Texas Hold'em. — Cheryl Hines

The Armadillo A big fiesta was announced on Lake Titicaca, and the armadillo, who was a very superior creature, wanted to dazzle everybody. Long beforehand, he set to weaving a cloak of such elegance that it would knock all eyes out. The fox noticed him at work. "Are you in a bad mood?" "Don't distract me. I'm busy." "What's that for?" The armadillo explained. "Ah," said the fox, savoring the words, "for the fiesta tonight?" "What do you mean, tonight?" The armadillo's heart sank. He had never been more sure of his time calculations. "And me with my cloak only half finished!" While the fox took off with a smothered laugh, the armadillo finished the cloak in a hurry. As time was flying, he had to use coarser threads, and the weave ended up too big. For this reason the armadillo's shell is tight-warped around the neck and very open at the back. (174) — Eduardo Galeano

Missing someone has to be one of the worst human emotions. All the other feelings like anger and fear and horror get some much more airplay, as if their intensity gives them more value, but whereas those emotions come in violent bursts and are gone again, the gnawing ache of loss has to be simply endured. It's like background noise, it's always there, it never goes away. You just have to try to block it out, distract yourself, hope that tomorrow the hole they left behind has grown a little smaller. — Alexandra Potter

A British journalist, Sydney Brooks, writing in the North American Review, gauged America to be just as isolationist as ever. And why not, he asked? "The United States is remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors or any neighbors at all of anything like her own strength, and lives exempt in an almost unvexed tranquility from the contentions and animosities and the ceaseless pressure and counter-pressure that distract the close-packed older world." While easy in concept, neutrality in — Erik Larson

When politicians like Sen. Joseph Lieberman target video game violence, perhaps it is to distract attention from the material conditions that give rise to a culture of domestic violence, the economic policies that make it harder for most of us to own our own homes, and the development practices which pave over the old grasslands and forests. Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear; rather, they offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement. — Henry Jenkins

Noam Chomsky skittles and skithers all over the political landscape to distract the reader's attention from the plain truth. — Sidney Hook

Despite the fact the studio looks out of five windows onto a picture perfect view of sky, hills and wide open spaces, I work with my blinds firmly drawn, daylight filtered through their white canvas, a painterly northern light falling through two big skylights above my table, and nothing visible outside to distract me. — Debi Gliori

You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, and fictions to be promoted, pushed, and peddled until they are accepted as fact. — Nick Turse

It's funny the things people say when someone dies.
He's in a better place.
How do you know that?
Life goes on.
That's supposed to comfort me? I'm excruciatingly aware that life goes on. It hurts every damned second. How lovely to know it's going to continue like this. Thank you for reminding me.
Time heals.
No, it doesn't. At best, time is the great leveler, sweeping us all into coffins. We find ways to distract ourselves from the pain. Time is neither scalpel nor bandage. It is indifferent. Scar tissue isn't a good thing. It's merely the wound's other face. — Karen Marie Moning

Things are just that - things. They don't make us who we are. They make us look better on the outside, even when we're hollow on the inside. They're an illusion - the shiny objects that distract us from the really important things. — Chelle Bliss

Forgive me. It was stupid of me to think you might need company, when clearly all you required was that decanter."
"It was not stupid. It was very kind. Quite soft, actually. A very warm, womanly gesture. I am touched." He smiled softly. "However, if you truly want to help, if you really want to distract me, there are better ways. When I saw that dress, I dared hope you had realized that. — Madeline Hunter

When the momentum of mindfulness is well developed, it works like a boomerang; even if we want to distract ourselves, the mind naturally rebounds to a state of awareness. — Joseph Goldstein

London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. — E. M. Forster

All winning teams are goal-oriented. Teams like these win consistently because everyone connected with them concentrates on specific objectives. They go about their business with blinders on; nothing will distract them from achieving their aims. — Lou Holtz

I can't do this, I can't just be a wife. I don't understand how anyone does it - there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that or look around for something to distract you. — Paula Hawkins

I've long been against illegal aliens, partly because they distract us from an even bigger threat: real aliens. — Stephen Colbert

It is an inherent nature of life: Whenever success is in your reach, it tosses either an unexpected obstacle or an alluring offer, straight on your path. That unexpected manifestation, obstacle or offer, would either prompt you to press the panic button or distract your focus from your target. As you become busy dealing with the fresh situation, time, with its own flair, flies miles away from your reach, with the reward in offer. Those who endure, without getting disturbed by the obstacle or decoyed by the illusive offer, will reap the fruit. Others will flop, falling as victims to life's conspiracy. — Hari Parameshwar

Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn't work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness. — Neil Gaiman

The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always. And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago. And — Greg Iles

The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under. — C.S. Lewis

One way to prevent yourself from going through a considerable amount of useless pain is to see the truth of the following and then to act upon your discovery accordingly: judging others doesn't change how much they disturb you; it serves only to distract you from seeing just how little it actually takes to set you off. — Guy Finley

I seem to wish to have some importance
In the play of time. If not,
Then sad was my mother's pain, my breath, my bones,
My web of nerves, my wondering brain,
to be shaped and quickened with such anticipation
Only to feed the swamp of space.
What is deep, as love is deep, I'll have
Deeply. What is good, as love is good,
I'll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it.
If not, if all is a pretty fiction
To distract the cherubim and seraphim
Who so continually do cry, the least
I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world
With human deep-sea sound, and hold it to
The ear of God, until he has appetite
To taste our salt sorrow on his lips.
And so you see it might be better to die.
Though, on the other hand, I admit it might
Be immensely foolish. — Christopher Fry

When working, my diet degrades to pizza three times a day, because I don't want to distract myself from anything. — Chuck Palahniuk

Excess of trouble may, for a time, distract and overwhelm the soul. Our Lord himself seems to have experienced somewhat of this. Our prayers, perhaps, are never more acceptable, than when they are offered in broken accents, in sighs, and groans. — Charles Simeon

Nothing surprises me anymore. We'll keep doing what we're doing. I'm going to keep going forward with solutions that I want to see applied to this great country, the challenges that we're facing. And things like that [e-mails as governor published] are going to be perhaps a distraction for others. They won't distract me. — Sarah Palin

I think ya'll should work for me this summer in Gutshot. I'm starting a project, and you'd be perfect for it.
Over the years, people had occasionally sought to employ Colin in a manner beffitting his talents. But (a) summers were for smart-kid camp so that he could further his learning and (b) a real job would distract him from his real work, which was becoming an ever-larger repository of knowledge, and (c) Colin didn't really have any marketable skills. One rarely comes across, for instance, the following want ad: — John Green

Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster. — James Harvey Robinson

The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate. — Antonin Artaud

Suppressing his grimace, James gave his new boyfriend a thin smile. Tall, dark, and handsome, Fred was exactly his type, but James couldn't say he liked Fred all that much. They had been together for two weeks already, but he still felt uneasy every time Fred touched him. He couldn't help it. No matter what his mind knew, his heart still couldn't get the memo that he wasn't Ryan's, and every touch, every kiss felt like cheating. It had been easier with Paul. With Paul, James had managed to half-convince himself he could love Paul. With Fred, he couldn't. He'd chosen Paul because he had liked him; he'd chosen Fred because he needed a boyfriend. Because he needed to distract Ryan, needed to dispel any suspicion. — Alessandra Hazard

All television is an advertisement - that's why it exists. It wasn't the art-form first and then the commerce - it was that they could put on entertainment long enough to distract people into looking at products. It's for focusing people on advertising and separating you from money in some way. Some people forget that. The side product is that we get some great eye candy. TV is the best it has ever been right now. I don't have a problem with that since it's what keep us employed. — Chris Hardwick

Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Fiction comes in all shapes and sizes. Secrets,lies,stories. We all tell them. Sometimes,because we hope to entertain. Sometimes,because we need to distract. And sometimes, because we have to. — Jodi Picoult

The point is not to let the orthography distract the reader from the meaning. — Mary Norris

I don't think they're gratuitous with the nudity on 'Game of Thrones.' It's very much part of the world. There's a lot of it, but that's the world they come from. It never is there to distract from the scene or the actors or story. — Neil Marshall

Are men like babies? Is trying to distract them a better tactic than asking them to behave reasonably? — Sophie Hannah

A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they've had since time began. — Marguerite Duras

The job he did kept his brain busy enough to cover up the anxiety; to distract him from his dark thoughts. He could deal with lists and finances, any amount of work, any sort of job. That came easy to him. But love? Love was alien and frightening. The anxiety he felt at just the thought of her leaving him made him feel so severely sick sometimes, he couldn't even work. He was so in love with her. — Sarah Michelle Lynch

[Society] is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness. — Meg Jay

I'm scared, but I need to get out of this room. I need to find ways to distract the gnawing pain that feeds off of every surface of my body. — Sara Farizan

Gossip is just a tool to distract people who have nothing better to do from feeling jealous of those few of us still remaining with noble hearts. — Anna Godbersen

Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines. — Dean Koontz

Want to play baseball?'" she asked. Shane's eyes opened, and he stopped stroking her hair. "What?'" "First base,'" she said. "You're already there.'" "I'm not running the bases.'" "Well, you could at least steal second.'" "Jeez, Claire. I used to distract myself with sports stats at times like these, but now you've gone and ruined it. — Rachel Caine

When you're right there in the crisi, you'll do anything to make yourself feel better, distract yourself from the misery, deny reality, not matter how stupid. — Anna Maxted

However, inflation and unemployment have affected the shopping centers at least as much as the rest of the economy, so that here and there among the brave enticements stood a storefront dark, silent, its windows black, its forehead nameless, its prospects bleak. The survivors seemed to beam the more brightly in their efforts to distract attention from their fallen comrades, but Dortmunder could see them. Dortmunder and a failed enterprise could always recognize one another. — Donald E. Westlake

Anti-drug fanatics and cops are the criminals - it's like McCarthyism. They need someone to dislike to distract the public from the really important problems. — Ken Kesey

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic. — Robert Graves

Do not allow doubt to distract you if only you will install in the altar of your heart steady faith in My Divinity, you can win a vision of My Reality. — Sathya Sai Baba

Women, however charming, have this disadvantage: they distract the mind from food! — Agatha Christie

The primary conversion goal on a page drives all of its elements, including copy, design, and layout. Goals that distract visitors from the primary conversion goal should be reworked or removed. Never lose focus of your main objective on the site (conversion). When you lose focus, your conversion rates will drop. It's that simple. — Khalid Saleh

Our state of wellness determines our response to any situation. Never allow the busyness of life to distract you from taking care of your well being. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It's not vanity, because if you look weird, it will distract from what your trying to do. If you look as good as you can, people will be able to pay attention to what your actually saying. — Tina Fey

I you want people to judge you based on the inside, don't distract them from the outside. — Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

It's like I'm trying to distract him with something shiny." Cath circled her spoon hand in front of her face, accidentally flicking cottage cheese on her sweater. "He already knows about all this. This is what I look like." She tried to scrape the cottage cheese off without rubbing it in." (pg. 290) — Rainbow Rowell

Ashram Cat
When the guru sat down to worship each evening, the ashram cat would get in the way and distract the worshipers. So he ordered the cat be tied up during evening worship. Long after the guru died, the cat continued to be tied up during evening worship. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be dutifully tied up during evening worship. Centuries later, learned treatises were written by the guru's disciples on the essential role of a cat in all properly conducted worship.
That's often the way we operate in the church. We don't ask the right questions, and we overlay our past experiences-or reactions
against them-on what we think we should do for the future. — Mark Pierson

When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one — Marcel Proust

The important thing when it comes to grooming, as when it comes to clothes, is you do not want anything to distract from the strength and power of your ideas,. — Vanessa Friedman

There was nothing to see, nothing to distract me from succumbing to my fears, and the longer I kept my eyes shut, the more terribly I saw my fears wanted me to see. — Paul Auster

I can feel it, logic is trying to distract me but my heart it's screaming it's him. — Nikki Rowe

It is sad that the Republican leadership is not as interested as they say they are in protecting the institution of marriage as they are in waging a campaign to divide and distract the American people from the real issues that need to be addressed. — Kendrick Meek

You happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless hair trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness
a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of the kitchen chair — David Rakoff

We tend to manage our lives intellectually - in other words, we get stuck in our heads, keeping ourselves preoccupied with juggling an assortment of activities and responsibilities in order to manage the surface of life. Meanwhile, underneath we feel empty, hungry for meaning, restless, somewhat lost, and frequently ungrounded - as if we aren't really inhabiting our own bodies. This is why we keep ourselves so busy. It's one way to distract ourselves, at least temporarily, from experiencing the low-grade inner anxiety that haunts us. Change — Sonia Choquette

The world of "magick" is, nine times out of ten, a world where people can hide their deep-set insecurity and personal damage behind illusion, constructed identities and claims to privileged knowledge, power or spiritual status. A gaudy carnival magic show, conducted with props that have long since begun to disintegrate with age, that seems to function only to distract people from the real magic that is occurring all around them, in every facet of their lives, every day of their lives. While the rituals and magical techniques of the Temple seem overly simplistic in comparison with the loftier Qabalahs, tables of correspondences and secret formulae of "high" magick, they have one thing which high magick quite often forgets: a concrete function. — Jason Louv

I never quite toed the line. I was a bit disruptive. All my early school reports from the age of 5 were 'Daniel must learn not to distract others.' And now, that's what I do for a living. — Dan Stevens

A long moment of silence stretched out between them. Her conversation to this point had mostly been an attempt to distract him while she gathered her feelings: gathered them and ejected them, so that she could face him with a mind that was blank and smooth, with no thoughts for him to read. She was fairly good at this. Even bleary-headed and shaky with fatigue, she was good at emptying her mind. — Kristin Cashore

Dogs invite us not only to share their joy but also to live in the moment, where we are neither proceeding from nor moving toward, where the enchantment of the past and future cannot distract us, where a freedom from practical desire and a cessation of our usual ceaseless action allows us to recognize the truth of our existence, the reality of our world and purpose-if we dare. — Dean Koontz

What is madness?" she asked, sitting with one leg up against her chest, vaporous skirt flickering around her calves and vanishing into mist. "It's when men don't think right," Kaladin said, glad for the conversation to distract him. "Men never seem to think right." "Madness is worse than normal," Kaladin said with a smile. "It really just depends on the people around you. How different are you from them? The person that stands out is mad, I guess. — Brandon Sanderson

What? No heartbeat? Huh. Funny. Moving on, the bigger problem is why do I have circles under my eyes?' "And he'd say, 'Wait a second. Did you hear me? No heart!' And we'd be all 'Yes, yes, we heard you. But other than missing a major organ, what's wrong with me?' And then he'd go on and on about the whole no-heart thing, and then I would try to distract him by doing that dance I do - you know, the one that looks like the running man. . . . But before I finish my entire routine, the doctor would be texting the CIA to tell them about my lack of heart, and the rounds of involuntary government testing would begin. — Brodi Ashton

By the by," Stephen said, "what is the difference between a viscount and a stallion?"
Miss Marshall shook her head. "What is it?"
Stephen gave her a broad smile. "The first is a horse's arse. The second is an entire horse."
She buried her head in her hands. "No. You cannot distract me with terrible jokes. You are supposed to be looking up facts. Shoo!"
But Stephen didn't stop. "What's the difference between a marquess and a paperweight?"
"I'm sure you'll tell me."
"One of them can't do anything unless a servant helps it along. The other one holds down papers. — Courtney Milan

Winston Churchill once said, "If you want to destroy them, distract them." And that's exactly what our adversary does; he distracts us completely from the greater cause, which is to pull together so we might know Christ and make Him known. Second — Darlene Zschech

And you want more holes because you think pain will distract you from all the annoying celebrating? Or because stabbing me will make you feel better?"
"Something like that." She smiled enigmatically, went into the bathroom, and came out with a wad of cotton balls and a safety pin. — Holly Black

President Bush and his administration have tried to pull the wool over our eyes and distract the public from this possibly illegal domestic spying scandal. — Ellen Tauscher

We all lead double lives. It's a privilege for the artist and a curse for the ordinary man. One has to get used to it."
"It's a terrible thing to know too much. In life, our words are improvisations and our actions careless mistakes that end up by becoming habits. Fate beign the distraction of the gods, I distract myself by evading questions that I never asked myself in the past. We are in the hands of the improbable, are we not, my dear Cosette?"
- Monsieur Verjat- — Victor Hugo

The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they reveal. — Ken Hollings

If we were honest about it, our lives are all fiascoes. There really isn't anything of importance except maybe who gets handed your heart and what they do with it. And just so you don't spend a lot of time fretting over it, even that may be pretty meager." A few seconds passed. "We're just small, Judy. All of us, even though we do stuff every day of the week to distract ourselves from the fact, it's still true. We're just little and small and maybe if we have some backbone we do a few things worth doing and then we're gone. — Tom McNeal

Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can. Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of the social universe: the price tag. — David Bentley Hart

Only later during her prayers had it come to her how cunning Satan could be. Her love for Marcus could become a tool against her, for when her heart and mind were on Marcus, Julia lay forgotten.
Nothing must distract her from her mission here. And no one. — Francine Rivers

If he could have his way, Satan would distract us from our heritage. He would have us become involved in a million and one things in this life-probably none of which is very important in the long run-to keep us from concentrating on the things that are really important, particularly the reality that we are God's children. He would like us to forget about home and family values. He'd like to keep us so busy with comparatively insignificant things that we don't have time to make the effort to understand where we came from, whose children we are, and how glorious our ultimate homecoming can be! — Marvin J. Ashton

He took a deep breath. I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. I don't know if I'm supposed to distract you. If I'm supposed to make you laugh, or if I'm supposed to be reassuring you. I have no idea what to do, so all I'm doing is just being here. — Tijan

Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all. — Anne Rice

Fourth, you learn how to distract yourself from depressing thoughts. — Martin E.P. Seligman

They were Chinese vampires. They were discovered during renovation work at the Bok Kai Temple in Old Sacramento. One of the priests there told his brother about them. The brother's whatever the Chinese version of mobbed up is. Alex here thinks he's using them to distract the Nortenos and the Black Dragons long enough to take over the marijuana trade in Sacramento using the stuff they're making in a bunch of grow houses in Elk Grove."
Ted stared at me. "And will the Chinese vampires be joined by legions of Korean werewolves who have been cooking meth in trailer parks in Truckee?
"No. The werewolves are refusing to get involved. Trust me, I've tried to talk them into helping. They'll have nothing to do with it. — Eileen Rendahl

There will be many times in your lives
at school, and more particularly when you are a grown up
when people will distract or divert you from what needs to be done. You may even welcome the distraction. But if you use it as an excuse for not doing what you suppose to do, you can blame no one but yourself. If you truly wish to accomplish something, you should allow nothing to stop you, and chances are you'll succeed. — Julie Andrews Edwards

Tis in ourselves that we are thus
or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which
our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant
nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up
thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs, or
distract it with many, either to have it sterile
with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the
power and corrigible authority of this lies in our
wills. If the balance of our lives had not one
scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the
blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us
to most preposterous conclusions: but we have
reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal
stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that
you call love to be a sect or scion. — William Shakespeare

I try not to let the material aspects of different cultures distract me from getting to the essence of the person I'm photographing. Whether it's a man or a woman. Wherever they're from, I try not to let social status or cultural background affect me or affect the person. I strip all those things away to get down to the essence of the human being, the person. — Mario Sorrenti

These mysteries about how we evolved should not distract us from the indisputable fact that we did evolve. — Jerry A. Coyne

Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder. — Marie Kondo