Camryn Beaton > Camryn's Quotes

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
― Mary Oliver

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Where your attention goes, your time goes”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“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.”
― David Foster Wallace

“The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.”
― William Hazlitt, Selected Essays, 1778-1830

“You grant companies access to your attention so that they can alter your choices in exchange for entertainment. You identify with groups and grant them the ability to choose for you which problems you will be most concerned about. You listen to a friend when they care about something, and then you care about it too. One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“The most sophisticated software in existence is tasked with figuring out how to keep you from leaving a website.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Now, more than ever, I believe that the antidote to our ever-expanding to-do lists, the distractions of modern life, and the fragmentation of our attention is to do one thing at a time. Once we realize that we are the ones who control our own attention, we can choose where to apply it.”
― Thatcher Wine, The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time to Do Everything Better