“Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention...the capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.”

“In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.”

“Art is born in attention.”

“The reward for attention is always healing.”

“So much of an artist's career hinges on the sense that we are going somewhere, that we are not just trapped by the four walls of wherever we are. For creative sanity, I must believe that if I just do the next right thing, a path will unfold for me.”

“James - "Are you paying attention or just trying to make me look like an idoit?"Elizabeth - "Oh, I'm definately paying attention. If you look like an idiot it has nothing to do with me.”

“It is one of the gifts of great spiritual teachers to make things simple. It is one of the gifts of their followers to complicate them again. Often we need to scrape away the accumulated complications of a master’s message in order to hear the kernel of what they said. (24)”