Quotes by American Authors - Page 298

Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.
Sherry Turkle
We come here (literally) reaching for intimacy and love. But it seems soon after our arrival, we're made to believe that they're luxuries not necessities.
Rashod Ollison
Connectivity becomes a craving.
Sherry Turkle
Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.
James Baldwin
Every promise we kept, every squeeze of the hand, every secretive smile we exchanged, every crying child we comforted- every one of those moments narrowed the distance between us.
Nadia Hashimi
She had come to him the fool, thinking herself the experienced one. After all, she had nothing to give that another hadn't had, nothing so far as she knew. But he'd taken what hadn't been there; what was his; what was promised.
Shewanda Pugh
Loneliness chosen is always preferable to loneliness imposed
Bell Hooks
I've given myself to you. You may have my body, soul, everything. Time passes, and all I want is the intimacy that slows, defeats. and confounds it. Love, that's what it is. You've always made the mistake that men often make, and carried forward the great fault that mars civilisation, which is that you believe that your philosophy is deeper than love.
Mark Helprin
a city square that's designed on a scale to express national greatness is hostile to the human intimacy necessary for freedom's space [George Packer, "History: Influence on Humanity"].
Catie Marron
As women shut down their needs, they also shut down their sense of pleasure.
Terrence Real
I wished I could spend the rest of my life... being slightly crushed by someone who loved me.
Gail Carson Levine
The paradox of real love is that our capacity to sustain intimacy rests on our capacity to tolerate aloneness inside the relationship.
Terrence Real
the rain in this room is low and thickand undressing my heart through the air. – intimacy 
Nayyirah Waheed
A hug is a display of love that begins on the physical end of the spectrum but bleeds into the emotional end of the spectrum if you let it, if you give into it. It’s the most innocent, pure form of physical human connection there is. It only takes two willing people, who don’t even have to know each other, to participate. Two willing people who want that exchange. It’s so easy, but there are people who never get them. People who never get them,” she repeats softly, it’s a confession.
Kim Holden
We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.
James Baldwin
Those minutiae calcify into the bones of our intimacy.
Jac Jemc
The only place Aletta and I could be together unseen was just under the rafters in the church tower, a circumstance that propelled us into an earlier intimacy than what we would have known had we been permitted to walk together Sunday afternoons under the wide sky.
Susan Vreeland
That is a terrifically intimate thing, you know? Letting a stranger light your cigarette. Leaning forward so he can hold a flame to your lips. Pausing to breathe in before you pull back again.
Elizabeth Wein
. . . the walls of her vagina tightening around me as she laughed.
Eric Jerome Dickey
You know what’s so funny and sad about us human beings? . . . We are constantly torn between the all-consuming desire to be loved and the terrifying fear of being known. Deep inside we don’t believe the two things can exist together, that if anyone really knew us, they would surely never love us, so we spend our whole lives concocting this wonderful, plastic shell that we fight like madmen to keep pristine. But eventually the plastic cracks and what is inside is a raw, quivering mass of imperfect humanity that has always been lovely and precious enough for God Himself to love.
Earlene Fowler
Though there are exceptions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism tend to stress desirable states of consciousness, escaping the fretful, self-aware state of mind that so often makes everyday living a burden. For mystics from the Abrahamic faiths, however, the inward odyssey is also an upward odyssey, a quest for personal and vital communion with an infinite Being.
David C. Downing
We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.
Richard Brautigan
the sweet juices of your mouthare like castles bathed in honey.i've never had it done so gently before.you have put a circle of castlesaround my penis and you swirl themlike sunlight on the wings of birds.
Richard Brautigan
It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.
Elizabeth Kostova
Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn’t take it, at pleasure. And,similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest; instead things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them. How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As much time as you care to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined. For many days, so long as you want to keep drawing that mitt, and studying that mitt, there will always be a new and finer layer of distinctions to draw out and lay in. Your attention discovers—seems thereby to produce—an array of interesting features in any object, like a lamp.
Annie Dillard
Not every President is a great speaker. Not every President is a great thinker. But in the modern era, every single President is a master of one thing: eye contact.
Brad Meltzer
To both my parents, the world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard.
Chuck Palahniuk
I’m not a follower. I never have been. But I’ll definitely become someone I’m not for a few hours if it’ll make me blend in rather than make me a blatant eye sore and draw attention.
J.A. Redmerski
...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...
Herbert A. Simon
Cassandra, when you want to speak to me, you should say 'Excuse me, Mrs. Johnson.' Then wait until you get my attention.""Excuse me, Mrs. Johnson. Do I have your attention now?
Pseudonymous Bosch
Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.
Orson Scott Card
Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere.
Gian-Carlo Rota
(It’s) a fair exchange. You’re giving me attention. That’s a form of affection, you know.
Arthur Gordon
All that mattered was him looking at me
Jonathan Safran Foer
Sometimes pain is God’s megaphone, his only way to get our attention.
Robert Hellenga
God is the one who puts dreams inside you. So you'd better chase them fast, before He decides to let them chase you instead....Because sometimes He does that, just to get your attention.
Amy Matayo
Attention is the most concrete expression of love. What we pay attention to thrives. What we do not pay attention to withers and dies. What will you pay attention to today?
Karen Maezen Miller
However, attention can be moved away from an unwanted focus, primarily by focusing intently on another target.
Daniel Kahneman
He had never looked at me before, never, and the idea made my skin burn.
Rainbow Rowell
Her romances often seemed like dalliances; she enjoyed male company and blossomed in its presence, but she did not appear to care deeply about any of the men [Steiner]
Elizabeth Winder
He had to do so many things and make each appear as though it were the only thing he had to do. He had to compartmentalize everything, when on one task to pretend that the others didn't exist.
Tom Clancy
According to the prevailing notion, freedom manifests as “preference-satisfying behavior.” About the preferences themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of deference to the autonomy of the individual. They are said to express the authentic core of the self, and are for that reason unavailable for rational scrutiny. But this logic would seem to break down when our preferences are the object of massive social engineering, conducted not by government “nudgers” but by those who want to monetize our attention.
Matthew B. Crawford
Is it possible that the national psychology emphasizing bigness has caused us to think only in those terms – to the detriment of the small things that have to be done if we are to win the war?
Molly Guptill Manning
From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady on the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.
Frederick Buechner
The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.
Daniel Kahneman
People will stop trying to prove their something special when they finally realized their already unique in God's creation.
Ron Baratono
Everytime he looked at her she felt brighter inside, and she yearned to keep his attention, to hold his gaze.
Jessica Khoury
There's always more than what meets the eye. If you dig in deep enough and pay attention, you can really see the beauty in a person.
April Mae Monterrosa
I learned to cope with my needs for attention by creating my own private personal rituals to make myself feel special.
Merrill Markoe
Even those who know better, such as the King, nurse strange ideas about me as a prophet. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know everything.
Geraldine Brooks
I should leave, she told herself once or twice, to savor the thought of their surprise, their regret. What a childish idea. Then Jack would leave, no doubt, so that should would come back, as she would have to do, and her father would be plunged in sorrow of which she was directly the cause, and which would not end in this life.
Marilynne Robinson
God’s love is God’s attention.
Pat Schneider
The longer I observe the way people really act, the happier I am that I never pay attention to them.
George Alec Effinger
What is the greatest need of human beings? What is it they seek from me always? Intimacy. I listen with all my being, I am completely interested. I seek momentarily a full communion of eyes, feelings, thoughts.
Anaïs Nin
I lower my mouth to his and kiss him softly. He closes his eyes and begins to ease his head against the bed. "Keep them open," I whisper, pulling away from his lips. He opens them, regarding me with and intensity that penetrates straight to my core. "I want you to keep them open...because I need you to watch me give you the very last piece of my heart.
Colleen Hoover
The gift of your time and attention is love in action.
Michael Thomas Sunnarborg
Everyone's always making fun of him and calling him crazy behind his back, but I can kind of understand how someone would end up that way. I mean, if no one ever pays attention to you telling the truth, then it probably makes sense to try lying for a change.
Amy Reed
Loyalty is what you focus on and won't give up.
Shannon L. Alder
Before being born, his mother explained, babies go to school. Not a school like Boris’s, but a different kind of school, where all the teachers are angels. The angels teach each baby the entire Torah, along with all of the secrets of the universe. Then, just before each baby is born, an angel puts its finger right below the baby’s nose—here she paused to put her finger across his lips (could he see the blood under her skin, or did he only imagine it?)—and whispers to the child: Shh—don’t tell. And then the baby forgets. “Why does he have to forget?” Boris had asked, moving his lips beneath her finger. He didn’t want to know, not really. But his mother’s back had stiffened, and he could feel that she might get up at any moment, put out the light, walk away, disappear. She pulled her hand away from his face, resting it on her own stomach. “So that for the rest of his life,” she said, “he will always have to pay attention to the world, and to everything that happens in it, to try to remember all the things he’s forgotten.
Dara Horn
It is no different from the way it is on Earth, if one is paying attention. If only people would pay closer attention, to everything. Then they would know what mattered without stumbling blindly (albeit at times willingly) in the wrong direction. Man may be born to trouble, be he doesn't have to stay there.
Lorna Jane Cook