Diana Gabaldon Quotes

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

Dirac politely refused Robert's [Robert Oppenheimer] two proffered books: reading books, the Cambridge theoretician announced gravely, "interfered with thought."

When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools.

I sometimes got distracted easily and allowed my mind to wander when I needed to be focused. It's quite subtle, really, and just being aware of it helps.

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work.

I love challenges, I love intensity, and I also like to challenge my mind. Believe it or not, boxing is not only about physical force. You use a lot of concentration; it's really mental.

I find that nothing but very close and intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems at all to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement.

The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.

don't stop to think of the words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better-and let your mind off yourself in this work.

The entire world is a collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.

To concentrate implies bringing all your energy to focus on a certain point; but thought wanders away... Whereas attention has no control, no concentration. It is complete attention, which means giving all your energy, the energy of the brain, your heart, everything, to attending.

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

Wing Chun teaches you what to concentrate on, whether you're here or out in the world dealing with problems. It's second nature for me now. I don't even get to the point where there's a problem.

[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it

Memory: what wonders it performs in preserving and storing up things gone by - or rather, things that are

I've worked hard to remember it...The problem is I'm not sure what's real memory and what's my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I'm sure of my bright light.

The mind generally takes up various objects, runs into all sorts of things. That is the lower state. There is a higher state of the mind, when it takes up one object and excludes all others.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.

I don't think I remember my first memory.

Sometimes it is difficult to remember, but other times it is very easy to remember. Sleep deprivation is the killer.

Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and at that same point it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations. So, you know, if you remember from when you were, you know, in second grade and there was Christmas and you got a present from your grandfather and your mom was wearing a red dress, that may or may not all have happened.