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Focus Quotes

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Focus Quotes

“If your primary focus is to get over your health problems or get past a relationship crisis so that you can return to your former life and old patterns- that is, get back to business as usual-you are not really living. The distinction is paradoxical and sometimes subtle. It's the difference between walking through your life on your way to somewhere, and walking as your life. Even if you believe that where you want to get is extremely important, that destination is secondary. Your immediate experience is what really matters. It is your life.”

“But, as potentially the first African American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?”

“After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's.”

“I love to exercise my creativity in many ways but as each year of specialization goes by I feel further and further from my other creative selves. I used to be able to see myself doing many things and sometimes I still long for a job that involves less pressure and grappling with people but, as you say, I am one of the lucky ones so I try to just focus on feeling lucky and carry on!”

“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.”

“People sometimes focus on the red button hot topic issues and I'm, like, you know, who cares about priestly celibacy? I'm thinking about how am I forgiving my enemies? How am I turning the other cheek? How am I loving my neighbor as myself? To me that's 10,000 times more difficult than to say should priests be married or not be married? I'm, like, I think we're wasting all out energies on the wrong thing. Let's work on the most difficult stuff.”

“In stories, everything has to have clear consequences and everything has to focus to the end. Everything at the end will give meaning to everything that precedes. In my own life, the consequences of the choices I've made aren't always very clear. The most beautiful things are sometimes not totally truthful, and the end will not give more meaning to everything that precedes.”

“Sometimes I train in the middle of the night, all on my own. Can't sleep, don't want to sleep, get up, go to the gym, work. This is early for me, being here at half ten in the morning, this is really early, and I'm only here because I screwed up yesterday and kept you hanging around. Other times I'll call up my wrestling coach, or my jiu jitsu coach, or my deep-tissue guy, and want to really focus on one part of what I do. I train in all these different disciplines.”

“There's this moment sometimes, when you do a crossword puzzle and you have the one really long word. And once you get that, the whole thing kind of comes into focus. Sometimes it's just working things over in your mind and then finding that one line that kind of ties the song together, and now it works. It's a puzzle of sorts.”

“I just find it crazy what people will critique you on, and you have to take it with a grain of salt. I could be curing cancer, and I would be shunned for it. I mean, that's just the truth. People are crazy, but I like to say for every hater I have 100 people that love me and they think it's motivational, so I try to focus on that. But it's sometimes hard, you know?”

“I find myself having rehearsal chats, in my head, for conversations I need to have. Sometimes they are arguments, things I need to get off my chest, award acceptance speeches. Ultimately, it clears my mind, helps me focus my thoughts, and sometimes alleviates the need for the real conversation.”

“I think any filmmaker will tell you when they wandered from theater to theater to watch their prints, it was disheartening to see the poor levels of light and the disrespect for films that existed in certain theater chains. It was always inconsistent. And in the lab, too, the photochemical process was very difficult to watch, because sometimes they were shipping prints that you didn't even know were two points off or three points off. We suffered greatly to make these films, and they'd be out-of-focus, with the sound too low.”