To Get Attention Quotes & Sayings

I know that I am an excellent live performer. I know that I have spent my life paying attention to my art form, developing my art form, worrying about my show and what it is I'm bringing to people, making sure that I give them a fine trade. They get a two-hour show, sometimes a three-hour show, for a decent price. — Gallagher

Pay careful attention to the bodily sensations that you recognize as hunger. When you feel yourself starting to get hungry, sit down for a few minutes (and if you can't sit down, stand still). Where in your body do you experience hunger? In your throat? Your chest? Your stomach? Your legs? How is this sensation different from the sensation, let's say, of excitement? Or loneliness? What happens to you when you feel yourself getting hungry? Do you feel that you need to eat immediately? — Geneen Roth

Sit Down - What to do if a parent wants to get their child's attention. — Olive Hunter

We have to start encouraging women to get into math and science early on in life ... But to just say TechCrunch is perpetuating the problem because there aren't enough women speakers at our events is just a way to get attention and not solve the problem. So do we want to solve the problem, or do we want to just pick on me? — Michael Arrington

Consider when, on a voyage, your ship is anchored; if you go on shore to get water you may along the way amuse yourself with picking up a shellish, or an onion. However, your thoughts and continual attention ought to be bent towards the ship, waiting for the captain to call on board; you must then immediately leave all these things, otherwise you will be thrown into the ship, bound neck and feet like a sheep. So it is with life. If, instead of an onion or a shellfish, you are given a wife or child, that is fine. But if the captain calls, you must run to the ship, leaving them, and regarding none of them. But if you are old, never go far from the ship: lest, when you are called, you should be unable to come in time. — Epictetus

The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously. — Tom Robbins

At Gallaudet, deafness isn't an issue. You don't even think about it. Students can pay attention to accounting or psychology or journalism. But when a deaf person goes to another college, no matter how supportive it is, that person doesn't get the same access. — I. King Jordan

You see, most people play louder to get someone's attention, but getting quieter can stop a bull from charging. — Victor L. Wooten

Peter sighed into the water, and his breath sent a small circle of it into tiny ripples. "It seems cowardly, getting old. Don't you think?"
She rolled onto her side to look at him, pillowing her ear with her right arm, and letting her fingers dangle in the water beyond her head. "How is it cowardly?"
Peter kept his eyes on his reflection. "You just curl up around yourself, and sit by the fire, and try to be comfortable. When you get old, you just get smaller inside, and you try not to pay attention to anything but your blankets and your food and your bed."
"Being comfortable is not a bad thing."
Peter shrugged and turned his head to look at her as if it was a matter of fact. "Of course it is. Old people lock out all the scary, wild things. It's like they don't exist."
She wanted to say that she would have liked for those things not to exist, either, but she held her tongue, because she didn't want to sound like a coward. — Jodi Lynn Anderson

And thus I learned that at Harvard, while knowing a great deal is the norm and knowing everything is the goal, appearing to know everything is an acceptable substitute. I pondered this great truth during the two-hour seminar. I was so buoyed up by it that I didn't pay enough attention to snorkeling up little bits of food in order to keep my nausea under control. I sailed right on into my next class, another seminar, confident that I could get through it without losing my lunch. — Martha N. Beck

I was always really shy so I'd never try to get a guy's attention. — Kim Kardashian

Are you used to entertaining everyone with your tales of drama and conflict? Do you get attention and feel important every time you complain about how awful this man is? Stop settling for attention for the negative stuff in your life. — Karen Salmansohn

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home. — David Foster Wallace

You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Nit even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all. — Michael Chabon

When I see the attention movie stars get, it doesn't make me want to be in that position at all. — Benjamin Millepied

I think we have tremendous media covering the sport of boxing, even if boxing is a little bit lost in popularity with MMA sports. And I think that with the show 'Lights Out' it's going to get more attention to the sport, and it's going to put more attention to the problems that athletes in general have. — Wladimir Klitschko

The fact remains that books that really put gay people in the center, and especially books that do so in a way that is sexually explicit, tend not to get a great deal of mainstream attention: they don't tend to sell well, and they don't tend to win major awards. This makes the occasional exception, like Alan Hollinghurst, all the more remarkable. — Garth Greenwell

It seems like Weezer has gotten better and better at getting attention for everything besides our music. Part of that is just the nature of our culture now - you really have to scream to get some attention, so people even know you have a record out that they might want to listen to. — Rivers Cuomo

It's very difficult to consistently hit good iron shots if you get off to a bad start. That's why I'm always paying attention to my setup and takeaway. — Keegan Bradley

I wasn't looking for notoriety [when we marched]. But if that's what it took [to get attention], I didn't care how many licks I got. It just made me even more determined to fight for our cause. — Amelia Boynton Robinson

Johnson released a harsh breath. "Well. Guess I'll go on home and see if a ball game is on. See ya." Johnson turned to leave. "The Braves are on tonight," Ronowski called out to Johnson's back. God had to close his mouth, gaping open in surprise. Johnson turned and wasted no time asking the blond beauty if he wanted to watch the game with him. Ronowski flushed when all their attention was focused on him. "Uhm. Sure. I just need to get my stuff. I'll be r-right back," he stammered and walked quickly toward the precinct. God saw Johnson watch Ronowski's ass move as he walked; not taking his eyes off him until he was inside the building. Johnson turned back toward him and waggled his eyebrows. "Well my night is looking brighter." God — A.E. Via

When you want to do a big thing, get the mental pattern, make it perfect, know just what it means, enlarge your thought, keep it to yourself, pass it over to the creative power behind all things, wait and listen, and when the impression comes, follow it with assurance. Don't talk to anyone about it. Never listen to negative talk or pay attention to it and you will succeed where all others fail. — Ernest Holmes

On bad days, I like to wear something colourful so I strike attention. That's how I appear confident to others - and how I get confident. — Elizabeth Jagger

Suppose that a person writes what she must. That is only the first step of becoming a writer. The work must survive the moment of creation. It must get out to an audience. She or he must dare to show the work. She must risk ridicule, misunderstanding, scandal, condemnation, & what's often worse, none of the above: silence. No attention at all. — Marge Piercy

I knew Secrets and Lies was a great film, but I didn't expect it to get the attention it did because none of his other films had and I thought they were just as good. — Brenda Blethyn

Everywhere we walked we got plenty of attention due to the camera and sound men. The locals love to get on camera. [ ... ] I'd seen footage of Gandhi surrounded like this and always thought it was because he was very popular, but now I wonder if it was just because he had a camera crew with him. — Karl Pilkington

Hospitality is a wonderful and rare thing, but if you wanna get a lady's attention, you don't send one of your lackeys to ask her over, you do it yourself. — K'wan

(Quality time means giving a child undivided attention. For a small child, it means sitting on the floor ... )You must get down on the child's level if you eventually want to lead them to the adult world. — Gary Chapman

What the hell do I have to do to get your attention? Do I need to get up there?" I throw an arm toward the stage. His eyes swell for just a second, in shock. He reaches forward to hold my hands, but he catches himself in time and instead folds them across his chest. "Believe me, you have my full attention. — K.A. Tucker

Who knows if there are ghosts (sorry, Grandma) or just the living, breathing memories of your loved ones, inside you, speaking to you, trying to get your attention by any means necessary? — Jandy Nelson

When you have any kind of success in life, that's like the most dangerous moment that you're in because you're going to tend to think wow, I can just keep repeating what I've done. I'm a great person. People love me. All of the sudden they're giving me all of this attention. You get drunk on it and you lose your sense of balance and your sense of detachment. I know it's happened to me. — Robert Greene

I couldn't tell them what I was thinking because it seemed cheesy to me, but I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn't get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn't gotten to be a person yet. (294-295) — John Green

It's easy to get people's attention, what counts is getting their interest. — A. Philip Randolph

I think that we are starting to get much more conscious about, you know, the importance of the spiritual path, and we are fulfilling it by paying attention to ourselves. — Paulo Coelho

All of a sudden to get all of this attention, and to be away from home and working all the time was hard. I was on planes all the time. I didn't see my friends. I cried a lot. It was quite terrifying. — Kate Moss

I know what I'm doing," he growled.
"If you knew what you were doing, we wouldn't have two million zombie bunnies chasing us!" she shouted.
"Guys," Daphne said, trying to get their attention, but her sister was too angry to listen.
"How was I supposed to know that kid was mentally unhinged?" Puck said.
"I don't know," Sabrina snapped. "Maybe when we found him running from a dead body?"
"Guys!" Daphne shouted.
"What!" Puck and Sabrina snapped.
"LOOK OUT! — Michael Buckley

See, the thing is I didn't think that that song would get much attention because it's such a personal song to me. I just wrote it about my childhood, and I didn't know how that would read on an album. But it's been everybody's favorite song. I didn't tell my mom. It was a total secret. So I wrote it in secret and then decided to record it secretly, so she had no idea that the song was recorded. My producers sent me the track and I synched it up to all my baby videos and I played it for her one Christmas Eve, and she bawled her eyes out. She didn't even think that it was my song. She didn't think there was any way for me to record a song without her knowing. — Taylor Swift

I've been acting since I could function. I got into acting to get attention as a child. — Tamsin Greig

You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake. — Terry Pratchett

Live your passion. What does that mean, anyway? It means that when you get up for work every morning, every single morning, you are pumped because you get to talk about or work with or do the thing that interests you the most in the world. You don't live for vacations because you don't need a break from what you're doing - working, playing, and relaxing are one and the same. You don't even pay attention to how many hours you're working because to you, it's not really work. You're making money, but you'd do whatever it is you're doing for free. — Gary Vaynerchuk

To live in the world of creation - to get into it and stay in it - to frequent it and haunt it - to think intently and fruitfully - to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation - this is the only thing - and I neglect it, far and away too much; from indolence, from vagueness, from inattention, and from a strange nervous fear of letting myself go. If I can vanquish that nervousness, the world is mine. — Henry James

The whole financial structure of Wall Street seems to rise or fall on the mere fact that the Federal Reserve Bank raises or lowers the amount of interest. Any business that can't survive a one percent change must be skating on thin ice.
Why even the poor farmer took a raise of another ten percent just to get a loan from the bank, and nobody from the government paid any attention. But you let Wall Street have a nightmare and the whole country has to help to get them back into bed again. — Will Rogers

I could have easily got T-Pain or anybody like that, but let me just get somebody very left. That'll wake them up. Gaga. She's never done a rap record before. Pay attention. It's a method to my madness. — Wale

If you meditate or exercise, with the inward attention, the subtle world of thoughts, imagination, breathe, sensation and spiritual energy will get clear to you. — Roshan Sharma

It's always the same story: It's not 'violence' until somebody hits you back. Till then, you don't notice your guys hitting the other tribe. That's just normal background noise. It takes blood, buckets of it, to get a person's attention. And not just anybody's blood--it's gotta be your own, or that of a close relative. Otherwise it's just spots on the sidewalk. — Gary Brecher

She looked as if she were in the middle of posing for an unbelievably glamorous photo shoot. Then again, she always did. It was her talent. Clary, however, was staring stubbornly up into Isabelle's face and talking to her. Simon thought Clary would get her way and get Isabelle to pay attention to her eventually. That was her talent. — Cassandra Clare

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. — George Orwell

Last time I said something perhaps I shouldn't have, something that's been taken the wrong way: "The poor are always with you." At that moment, back then, I wanted my friends' attention. I meant I was going to die soon, but they would have the rest of their lives to care for the poor. But the rich have twisted my words to mean something quite different: that there's nothing you can do about the poor. That the poor are part of life, like disease or accidents or hurricanes or getting old. Poverty is natural. You'll never get rid of it, so forget about trying. Don't worry that the poor have so much less than you do. Go eat your big meal, go drive your big car, go sleep in your big house. Let the poor look in the windows. Jesus says it's OK. Well, Jesus doesn't say it's OK. OK? P — Tony Hendra

Is it like a Harry Potter thing?"
He turned his head then. "A what?"
"A Harry Potter thing," she said again. "You know, don't say Voldemort's name because you might attract his attention?"
He considered it. "You mean the children's book."
"I have got to get you to watch more movies," she said. "You'd enjoy these. Yes, I mean the children's book. — Patricia Briggs

Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues. — Bjorn Lomborg

I would sit up on top of the woodpile playing and singing at the top of my lungs. Sometimes I would take a tobacco stake and stick it in the cracks between the boards on the front porch. A tin can on top of the tobacco stake turned it into a microphone, and the porch became my stage. I used to perform for anybody or anything I could get to watch. The younger kids left in my care would become the unwilling audience for my latest show. A two-year-old's attention span is not very long. So there I would be in the middle of my act, thinking I was really something, and my audience would start crawling away. I was so desperate to perform that on more than one occasion I sang for the chickens and the pigs and ducks. They didn't applaud much, but with the aid of a little corn, they could be counted on to hang around for a while. — Dolly Parton

People that sneeze really loud in public need to find a hobby or a better way to try to get people's attention — Robert J. Braathe

I came at a time where male artists where dominating, so I had to do something quick to get people's attention. I wanted to let people know that women artists can hold their own compare to the men. Sex got their attention, while I open the road for the other female artists. — Lady Saw

I'm always amazed when adults say that children "just did that to get attention". Naturally children who need attention will do all kinds of things to get it. Why not just give it to them? — Lawrence J. Cohen

Now suppose that at the end of the page you get another instruction: count all the commas in the next page. This will be harder, because you will have to overcome the newly acquired tendency to focus attention on the letter f. — Daniel Kahneman

The way to get a man interested and to hold his interest was to talk about himself, and then gradually lead the conversation around yourself - and keep it there. — Margaret Mitchell

Most folks here got rules 'bout trespassing. Warning shot's fired right close to the head. Get they's attention. Next shot gets a lot more personal. Now I'm too old to waste time firing a warning shot ... — David Baldacci

The only thing I pay attention to with free throws is what a guy does in the final four minutes of a game. If you can improve players' self-esteem and confidence, get them to relax, teach visualization and routine, they will shoot as well, or better, with the pressure on. — John Calipari

Look at your weaknesses, not at your strengths, and pay attention to what you still need to do, instead of rehearsing in your mind what you've already accomplished. This is the best way to get and keep humility. — Anonymous

I like to get attention for the things I think are important. And I think it is important that entrepreneurs - especially young ones - not be abused. — Jason Calacanis

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by. — Mark Twain

I actually don't pay a lot of attention to the movie 'industry' ... I just do the work when I get it. I never considered anything I was in, or did, as a possible breakthrough for me. I have advised other actors not to expect anything. Expecting a 'breakthrough' is almost an automatic for sure 'let down' or heartbreak. — Mark Margolis

Reasonably speaking, we can see the cross as entirely possible. But in considering Easter, we see an empty tomb as entirely impossible. And is it possible that God had to do the impossible to finally get our attention? — Craig D. Lounsbrough

More and more, for the stupid little kid, that was the idea . . .
That if enough people looked at you, you'd never need anybody's attention ever again.
That if someday you were caught, exposed, and revealed enough, then you'd never be able to hide again. There'd be no difference between your public and your private lives.
That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you'd never want to own or do another thing.
That if you could eat or sleep enough, you'd never need more.
That if enough people loved you, you'd stop needing love.
That you could ever be smart enough.
That you could someday get enough sex.
These all became the little boy's new goals. The illusions he'd have for the rest of his life. These were all the promises he saw in the fat man's smile — Chuck Palahniuk

Sometimes you just have to go and make a mess of things to get people to pay attention. — Madonna Ciccone

Don't do any task in order to get it over with. Resolve to do each job in a relaxed way, with all your attention. Enjoy and be one with your work. — Thich Nhat Hanh

She banged her knuckles until they ached to get the attention of the living flesh behind the glass, and would have smashed her fist through the window just to touch him, feel his heat, the only thing that could protect her from a smothering death of dry roses. — Toni Morrison

A consequence may be the very thing that saves us because it was the only thing loud enough to get our attention. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Dirk was unused to making quite such a miniscule impact on anybody. He checked to be sure that he did have his huge leather coat and his absurd red hat on and that he was properly and dramatically silhouetted by the light on the doorway.
He felt momentarily deflated and said, "Er ... " by was of self-introduction, but it didn't get the boy's attention. He didn't like this. The kid was deliberately and maliciously watching television at him. — Douglas Adams

Before Bin Laden did everything but advertise. Yet he had to blow up the Twin Towers just to get the attention of anyone outside the intelligence community. So what did we do? We invaded the wrong country, killed the wrong madman, and too often used the wrong interrogation techniques on the wrong people-all because our leaders lost contact with the truth. — Richard North Patterson

It took a catastrophe of socialized medicine to wake a lot of people up because it affects every single person in America, either directly or indirectly. That's when you get people's attention - when it directly affects them. — Monica Crowley

I want people to just be paying attention even if they're not necessarily laughing at something, or if it takes them a while to get something, I don't mind that. If half the crowd gets the joke and the other half is sitting there scratching their heads, that's just as good for me if I like the joke, because I feel like it just brings people in more. — Anthony Jeselnik

Nine Principles Never have a wicked heart. Train not by thought, but by practice. Learn a wide variety of arts and skills, and do not fix on only one. Know not only your own techniques but also those of many others. Find out rationally what is an advantage and what is a disadvantage. Foster an intuitive ability to judge all things. Feel an essence that you cannot see on the surface. Pay attention to the very smallest of phenomena. (Everything takes its own course, and sometimes we get unexpected results.) Do nothing in vain, for the energy and time we have is limited. — Kazumi Tabata

You're both perfectly all right," she informed them. "And we will get Aurimere back, and our magic back, and our town back, and then we will have everything we need."

"We have some important stuff already," Ash offered tentatively.

Lillian frowned. "What do you mean?"

Jared surrendered himself to the strangeness of this situation, sank back onto the pillows himself with his head near Lillian's hip, and sighed heavily to attract his aunt's attention. "He wants to know you love him more than that stupid house."

"It is a very nice house," Aunt Lillian said, sounding offended. "Your ancestors are buried in the crypt of that house."

"Sure. Okay. We'll get our lovely creepy house back. When they bury me in that crypt, I want 'Jared, very inbred, deeply uncomfortable about it' on my tombstone. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Even when there's not a joke or a hook, the first line has to be good and snapem to attention. Songs ain't novels. You don't have 30 pages to slowly wrap somebody in. They're more like short stories or poems. If the first line hasn't grabbed them, you won't get to the second line. Once you've developed an audience, you may have some luxury and trust, so you don't have to knock 'em over the head with line one. — Dan Bern

Identifying a potential threat feels curiously good. You're like a gazelle that smells a lion and can't relax until it sees where the lion is. Seeing a lion feels good when the alternative is worse. We seek evidence of threats to feel safe, and we get a dopamine boost when we find what we seek. You can also get a serotonin boost from the feeling of being right, and an oxytocin boost from bonding with those who sense the same threat. This is why people seem oddly pleased to find evidence of doom and gloom. But the pleasure doesn't last because the "do something" feeling commands your attention again. You can end up feeling bad a lot even if you're successful in your survival efforts. — Loretta Graziano Breuning

I get tips from Bob Gaudio. And one of my songs somehow caught the attention of one of my idols, Marty Panzer, who wrote big hits for Barry Manilow. So two guys who inspired me to write lyrics are now teaching me to write. — Erich Bergen

I have bad days. Sometimes I have a lot of bad days. By and large, I think most people fall into a bad mood because they're able to ruminate on whatever the problem at hand is, and that makes it worse. But when you intercept the rumination process with something that requires your full attention - that's stimulating and absorbing, that places a demand on your intellectual focus - you don't get to ruminate. In a way, it's a mental health aid to be able to do that so much. My routine, what I do, it just feels like home. It's my comfort food. — Maria Popova

The people of Lancre wouldn't dream of living in anything other than a monarchy. They'd done so for thousands of years and knew that it worked. But they'd also found that it didn't do to pay too much attention to what the King wanted, because there was bound to be another king along in forty years or so and he'd be certain to want something different and so they'd have gone to all that trouble for nothing. In the meantime, his job as they saw it was to mostly stay in the palace, practise the waving, have enough sense to face the right way on coins and let them get on with the ploughing, sowing, growing and harvesting. It was, as they saw it, a social contract. They did what they always did, and he let them. — Terry Pratchett

Ladies and gentlemen, attention, please!
Come in close where everyone can see!
I got a tale to tell, it isn't gonna cost a dime!
(And if you believe that,
we're gonna get along just fine.) — Stephen King

We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat. — John Steinbeck

Aw, angel," he said, shaking his head as he looked around. "I get you now."

He got me? What the heck was that supposed to mean? "What?"

"You know, my grandmother is a big gardener," he said, tucking the flat of cat food under one arm and running his hand over the back of my sofa.

"That's wonderful. Now get out of my apartment."

"She's won awards 'round here for her roses," he went on his weird speech. His attention suddenly turned back toward me, pinning me into place. "She used to tell me that the prettiest roses have the biggest thorns. It's a defense mechanism. So," he said, coming closer toward me and running his finger across the side of my jaw, "I get you, Amelia Alvarado. — Jessica Gadziala

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. — David Foster Wallace

I was such a smart kid, I should have figured out that the only way to really get my parents' attention was to disappoint them or fail. But by the time I finally realized that, succeeding was already a habit too ingrained to break. — Sarah Dessen

A lot of people think that telling people you're gay is something someone might say just to get attention. — Dan Savage

From a social psychological standpoint, the selfie phenomenon seems to stem from two basic human motives. The first is to attract attention from other people. Because people's positive social outcomes in life require that others know them, people are motivated to get and maintain social attention. By posting selfies, people can keep themselves in other people's minds. In addition, like all photographs that are posted on line, selfies are used to convey a particular impression of oneself. Through the clothes one wears, one's expression, staging of the physical setting, and the style of the photo, people can convey a particular public image of themselves, presumably one that they think will garner social rewards. — Mark R. Leary

People stopping you in the street, though, is very different from being hounded by the press, which is the kind of attention that celebrities get, and I'm probably too old for that kind of thing to happen anyway. I think it happens more when you're dating all sorts of different very handsome actors or something. They want gossip and scandal, and they know they're not going to get it from me because I'm too old to be scandalous. Of course, they could read the book - although it's not really a scandalous book. — Grace Coddington

GreenHollyWood, I think that you asked me why I don't get out?
- I'm kinda in hateful state, I hate to watch the fucking liars to lie in front of my face and backward to put the knife in my back.

Why I stay home?
- It's awesome place, I feel safe and out of the ignorance there is always somebody to harass for to get attention. — Deyth Banger

No one achieves greatness by becoming a generalist. You don't hone a skill by diluting your attention to its development. The only way to get to the next level is focus. — John C. Maxwell

We grow up going to school, where you get a gold star, you get the A-plus," she says. "At work you're constantly being evaluated. Then you become a homemaker and suddenly nobody is giving you feedback. Suddenly no one is paying attention to what you're doing. Blogging is a way to get this validation from other people. You put up a recipe and people go, 'Hey, that's a great photograph.'" Clearly blogs can give emotional value to housework. But if a blogger is actually making money from a blog, even a little bit of money, it cane make the blog even more validating. — Emily Matchar

Most of the time, if you're not really paying attention, you're someplace else. So your child might say, "Daddy, I want this," and you might say, "Just a minute, I'm busy." Now that's no big deal-we all get busy, and kids frequently ask for attention. But over your child's entire youth, you may have an enormous number of such moments to be really, fully present, but because you thought you were busy, you didn't see the opportunities these moments presented ... People carry around an enormous amount of grief because they missed the little things. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Read a lot. Read broadly ... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored ... Write a lot. — John Green

Evil people relate more to the black pole. It's - this is not exact, of course, as the science of magic is as complex as the magic of electronics - it's like traveling past a mountain. The white pole is at the apex, and it is an exhilarating height, but it takes a lot of work and few missteps to ascend it. The black pole is at the nadir, and it is easy to walk downhill; sometimes you can just sit down and slide or roll and, if you fall, you can get there very fast indeed. If you don't pay attention to where you're going, you'll tend to go down, because it is the course of least resistance. Since the average person has only the vaguest notion where he is going and tends to shut out awareness of the consequence of evil, he inevitably drifts downward. There is much more space at the base of the mountain than at the peak! — Piers Anthony

We pass a church with a massive blue neon cross, and I am spiritually lifted by feelings of great religiosity. No, I'm not, for crying out loud. Don't be ridiculous. But what I do love about this road is how the gaudy becomes grand, how tastelessness is a way of everyday life. You have to admire how these people shamelessly try to get your attention as you drive by, whether they're trying to feed you a hamburger or a savior. (p.37) — Michael Zadoorian

The word listen in Latin is audire. If we listen with full attention in which we are totally geared to listen, it's called ob-audire, and that's where the word obedience comes from. Jesus is the obedient one. That means he is total ear, totally open to the love of God. And if we are closed, and to the degree that we are closed, we are surdus. That is the Latin word for deaf. The more "deaf" we get, the more absurdus — Henri J.M. Nouwen

I don't go out, so I don't get attention from girls. They're not going to have posters of me on their walls. I just try to get on with my life. — Gareth Bale

Open your eyes. Block all escape routes. Eliminate all noise. The common will capture your attention as long as it's allowed in the room. Whatever you are used to, whether cigarettes, shopping, or Twitter, must be eliminated in the quest to get into the ring. You must make a sacrifice on the altar of greatness and perform acts that others will not. If you aren't willing to sacrifice your comfort, you don't have what it takes. — Julien Smith

I remember the day when my seventh-grade teacher called my parents to tell them I'd been crying in the bathrooms at lunchtime after Sukey died - how disappointed Dad was that I was using Sukey's death as an excuse to get attention from my teachers; how delicately Mom suggested that Sukey would have wanted me to be happy; my humiliation at letting them down. — Hilary T. Smith

You get social pressure from your parents, who teach you to pay attention to certain things and not to others. You get it in school. — Martha Beck

And if there are gods after all, perhaps we should not struggle so hard to get their attention, if this is the attention they would lavish upon us. — Cherie Priest