A Quote by Mark Strand

We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.

Mark Strand

Quote Topics

Accident Almost Attention Been Born Having Lucky Obliged Only Pay Pay Attention Short Think While

Quote Author

Mark Strand
American - Poet
April 11, 1934 - November 29, 2014

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, 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 in 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

Learning to focus and pay attention, if only for a short time, has been identified as a primary key to the development of human effectiveness.

Robert Genn

To discover what you really believe, pay attention to the way you act -- and to what you do when things don't go the way you think they should. Pay attention to what you value. Pay attention to how and on what you spend your time. Your money. And pay attention to the way you eat.

Geneen Roth

I pay attention only to what people do or say. I never pay attention to what they think.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Pay attention to your friends; pay attention to that cousin that jumps up on the picnic table at the family reunion and goes a little too 'nutty,' you know what I mean? Pay attention to that aunt that's down in the basement that never comes upstairs. We have to pay attention to our friends, pay attention to your family, and offer a hand.

Jenifer Lewis

It’s so easy to think that we’re the only ones who suffer, while other people are somehow immune to pain, as though they’d been born with some kind of special knowledge about being happy, that, through some cosmic accident, we never received. Thinking in this way, we make our own problems seem much bigger than they really are.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

I'm trying to cause people to be interested in the particulars of their lives because I think that's one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention. Pay stricter attention to what you say to your son.

Richard Ford

Luck plays an enormous role in trading success. Some people were lucky enough to be born smart, while others were even smarter and got born lucky.

Ed Seykota

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

Marilyn Hacker

You is born lucky, and it's better to be born lucky than born rich, cause if you is lucky you can git rich, but if you is born rich and you ain't lucky you is liables to lose all you got.

Margaret Walker

I never did anything worth doing entirely by accident. . . Almost none of my inventions came about totally by accident. They were achieved by having trained myself to endure and tolerate hard work.

Thomas A. Edison

As the power of governments wanes, corporations become ever more powerful. Sometimes they do things that aren't so good. We should pay attention. Steve Jobs was saying, "Don't pay attention to all that stuff. Pay attention to the product you've got in your hand."

Alex Gibney

We had this idea, and I think a lot of people did going in, that you can make some short film and it's going to get industry attention and that's going to be your thing. And it was only later on at school that we realized that's very rare that a short film is going to capture the attention of anyone.

Ross Duffer

There are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us. And you know, in a way, if you don't pay that attention, the anger is just bitterness.