Attention Quotes

“Just under a thousand pages long (to say nothing of the endnotes, to say nothing of the footnotes that accompany many of the endnotes), it is a book written, in one sense, for a pre-iPhone brain, minutely detailed, endlessly populated, a novel that moves in millimeters. On the other hand, Infinite Jest is perfectly, almost uncannily suited for our digital age, its fragmented narrative jumping from one stream of ideas to the next. Wallace mirrors back to us exactly the kind of splintered thinking we’ve now grown used to through all the hours we spend online.”
― Casey Schwartz, Attention: A Love Story

“Yet, for Maté, trauma isn’t limited to overt acts of violence, neglect, or abuse, though these horrors are, he argues, more widespread than most people would guess. Trauma is just as much what happens to a child when their parents are too stressed out or depressed or distracted to be able to attune themselves to that child’s emotional life, to be able to intuit what their child is feeling and respond to it. It is the good thing that didn’t happen to you, as much as the bad thing that did. This too is trauma, he says, and it is an ever more common picture of life in the West, as parents, families, and neighborhoods are all increasingly splintered, communities eroded, individuals isolated.”
― Casey Schwartz, Attention: A Love Story