Focusing Illusion Quotes & Sayings

Isn't there someone kind enough to come strangle me in my sleep? — Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Entrepreneurs don't write a 100-page business plan and execute it one time; they're always experimenting and adapting based on what they learn. — Thomas Friedman

The mistake that people make in the focusing illusion involves attention to selected moments and neglect of what happens at other times. The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time. During the last ten years we have learned many new facts about happiness. But we have also learned that the word happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it does. Sometimes scientific progress leaves us more puzzled than we were before. — Daniel Kahneman

I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer. — Kazuo Ishiguro

To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention to this rather than to something else: to the 'words on the page' rather than to the contexts which produced and surround them. It implies a limiting as well as a focusing of concern - a limiting badly needed by literary talk which would ramble comfortably from the texture of Tennyson's language to the length of his beard. But in dispelling such anecdotal irrelevancies, 'close reading' also held at bay a good deal else: it encouraged the illusion that any piece of language, 'literary' or not, can be adequately studied or even understood in isolation. It was the beginnings of a 'reification' of the literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself, which was to be triumphantly consummated in the American New Criticism. — Terry Eagleton

The problem isn't a shortage of opportunities; it's a lack of perspective. — Tim Fargo

When we ground ourselves in the present moment, we spontaneously connect better with others. We become more responsive and less reactive, listening more deeply and speaking with greater clarity. — Lama Surya Das

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it — Daniel Kahneman

If you want to dry hump someone you don't know, just act like they were choking. — Demetri Martin

Your words surround you like fog and make you hard to see. — Blackbeard

Everywhere felt like a jail now- doors opening and closing, and me never feeling safe. — Gillian Flynn