#preoccupation

I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry. ↗

— Andrew Motion

#deal #events #going #great #great deal

At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. ↗

— Salvatore Quasimodo

#been #continuity #decorum #easy #explosion

It had always been a British preoccupation to hold this mile record. ↗

— Roger Bannister

#been #british #had #hold #mile

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history. ↗

— Penelope Lively

#interest #memory #operation #preoccupation #rather

Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn. ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#busyness #life #living #mind #preoccupation

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions. ↗

— Zbigniew Brzezinski

#defines #democracy #does #extremist #first

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. ↗

— Graham Greene

#creative-process #daily-life #preoccupations #subconscious #superficiality

The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find. ↗

— Freda Adler

#another #controversies #era #find #knowledge

Forgiveness isn’t something I’m preoccupied with — turning the other cheek isn’t my trip. ↗

— Karl Lagerfeld

#designer #forgive #forgiveness #karl-lagerfeld #past