Patrick Ness Quotes

You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.

I open my eyes and my ears, and that’s why I work.

But when we observe, we are forced to pay attention. We have to move from passive absorption to active awareness. We have to engage.

Pay attention to what you're paying attention to.

Attention may sound dull, but it is an essential aspect of consciousness. In fact, it governs what it is that we turn out to be conscious of, and therefore plays a part in the coming into being of whatever exists for us.

If you pay attention to the world, it's an amazing place. If you don't, it's whatever you think it is.

Pay attention to matters of importance.

How did they know?.

The best thing anybody ever told me about acting - and I think it's probably true for life, generally - is listen. You've really got to watch, and you've really got to listen. Not see and hear.

Some people look at big things, and other people look at very small things, but in a sense, we're all trying to understand the world around us.

People often ask me how I get so many unique experiences while they get none. I tell them the difference is in the sensitivity. I can observe those small emotions, which may look trivial to others.

It's interesting that stepping out of thought was actually triggered by a thought.

All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation midsentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind... Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky, and everything that moves, but you haven't really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: He sees too clearly and too much.

In tension you cannot perceive; in laxity you cannot perceive. Only if you are intense and relaxed, you perceive everything just the way it is.

With no object no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking.

The quality of our attention determines our experience.

You don't always have to look in the distance for what's going on over there, when you actually see what's right in front of you.

The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard.

Art is about paying attention.

If y'can't see with yore own two eyes what's in front of them, then y'better off closin' 'em an' goin' t'sleep, 'tis far more restful! —Gerul

You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.