Adrian was easily distractible by wacky topics and shiny objects.

To me, nudity is a joke. I don't think nude people are very attractive at all. I like my women fully clothed. I like to imagine what might be under there. It might not be the standard thing. Imagine, stripping a woman down, and she has a body like a little submarine. With periscope, propellers, torpedoes. That would be the one for me. I'd marry her right off and be faithful to the end.

No. Don't distract me with your sexy talk.

Finnik?" I say. "Maybe some pants?"?He looks down at his legs as if noticing them for the first time. Then he whips of his hospital gown, leaving him in just is underwear. "Why? Do you find this"-he strikes a ridiculously proactive pose-"distracting?"?I can't help laughing because it's funny, and it's extra funny because Boggs looks so uncomfortable, and I'm happy because Finnik actually sounds like the guy I met at the Quarter Quell.?"I'm only human, Odair." I get in before the elevator doors close. "Sorry," I say to Boggs.?"Don't be. I thought you? handled that well," He says. "Better than my having to arrest him, anyway.

Tell you what, you let me go, and I'll ask you plenty of questions about your race. Until then, I'm slightly distracted with how this little vacation on the good ship Holy Sh*t is going to pan out for me.

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Don't bite off more than you can chew because nobody looks attractive spitting it back out.

Haven't you ever heard that modesty is an attractive trait?

You wanted to lick my face the first time you saw me? Is that usually what you do when you're attracted to guys?

Curran looked back at me. "Why is it you always attract creeps?

I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.

There's no reason to have a plan B because it distracts from plan A.

One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals. And so when I hear about negative and false attacks, I really don't invest any energy in them, because I know who I am.

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse Gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

"For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it's that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it's going to work. It's astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks.

"If you envy successful people, you create a negative force field of attraction

When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

Solitude led to retrospective thinking, and if the past is what you are trying to get away from, then constant distractions in the present are needed.

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

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.

Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.