Attention Deficit Disorder Quotes

My doctor told me i had Attention Deficit Disorder. He said, 'ADD is a complex disorder, blah, blah, blah,' I didn't pay attention to the rest. ~ Kyle Dunnigan

I'm one of those people who, if time permits, can read more than one book at a time, sometimes three. I don't know if that's indicative of an attention deficit disorder, all I know is that I've always been that way. ~ Janalyn Robnett

It's not a disability, it's life. We are complicated creatures with larger matters on our plate than tip calculation. I grew up watching TV with my mother while she diagnosed the characters as having hyperactivity or attention-deficit disorder. I rolled my eyes and wondered why there weren't any stupid kids anymore. Why did there have to be something to explain everyone? Were the cave people on Ritalin? I didn't think so. ~ Sloane Crosley

If you can somehow force a liberal into a point-counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you've said - unless you were in fact talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It's like arguing with someone with Attention Deficit Disorder. ~ Ann Coulter

It is like our foreign policy has attention deficit disorder. ~ Tim Ryan

My nephew has HDADHD. High Definition Attention Deficit Disorder. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it's unbelievably clear. ~ Steven Wright

Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure. ~ Stephen Fry

The major impairments of ADD - the distractibility, the hyperactivity and the poor impulse control - reflect, each in its particular way, a lack of self-regulation. Self-regulation implies that someone can direct attention where she chooses, can control impulses and can be consciously mindful and in charge of what her body is doing. Like time literacy, self-regulation is also a distinct task of development in human life, achieved gradually from young childhood through adolescence and adulthood. We are born with no capacity whatsoever to self-regulate emotion or action.

For self-regulation to be possible, specific brain centers have to develop and grow connections with other important nerve centers, and chemical pathways need to be established. Attention deficit disorder is a prime illustration of how the adult continues to struggle with the unsolved problems of childhood. She is held back precisely where the child did not develop, hampered in those areas where the infant or toddler got stuck during the course of development. ~ Gabor Mate

I'm dyslexic, I have attention-deficit disorder, and I've got something like a hereditary tremor. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

attention deficit disorder in his own son. "I had worked in an ADHD clinic during my residency, and had strong feelings that this was overdiagnosed," he said. "That it was a 'savior' diagnosis for too many kids whose parents wanted a medical reason to drug their children, or to explain their kids' bad behavior. ~ Michael Lewis

So, please people, if you know someone with AD(H)D, don't try to change that about them. Don't take that one skill away, or make them feel ashamed to use it. Sometimes procrastination is all they have in their little superhero tool belt! ~ Stacey Turis

Or what about attention deficit disorder, and the litany of negative, even catastrophic associations it carries? Fifteen years ago, it barely existed, but today it's being diagnosed left, right, and sideways. I'm not suggesting that some kids don't have it, or can't benefit from treatment, but ADD (and the fear of our children being diagnosed with it) has saturated our culture like a virus. And the result, of course, is millions of parents buying their children drugs. A parent's internal monologue may go something like this:

If my child doesn't take Ritalin, or Adderal or Concerta, he won't be able to concentrate in school. He'll fall behind. His grades will suffer. He'll be marginalized by his peers. He'll begin hanging out with other low-performing kids. He won't get into college. He'll drift from job to job. He may even end up in jail. All because I didn't address his ADD when he was in kindergarten.

Fear, in my experience, spreads faster than anything else - and the ads for those drugs have done a very nice job scaring the pants off us. ~ Martin Lindstrom

Reading is the unbelievably healthy way
my attention deficit disorder medicates itself.
Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to
make contact with reality after a day of making things up. ~ Nora Ephron

Is there a different between Attention Deficit Disorder and daydreaming? He mused. Ah, there I go again. Focus, ~ Stephen R. King

I was a classic attention deficit disorder kid, always bored and mouthing off at school. ~ Stephen Rodrick

A friend gave me a drug for attention deficit disorder, because he's afflicted, but I'm not. So what happened to me is I suddenly had an extra-long attention span. People would tell me a story, and it would end, and I'd get all mad. "Come on, man, there has to be more to that story." ~ Mitch Hedberg

Serge's attention-deficit disorder was the first of many hyphens. Obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, anal-retentive, paranoid-schizophrenic. He was believed to be the only self-inflicted case of shaken-baby syndrome. ~ Tim Dorsey

I've been dyslexic and had Attention Deficit Disorder at some time in my life. I still read with a highlighter, but I've always loved to read. ~ Andrew Young

I realize that I can be with someone, but on a deeper level I'm not available to them at all. I have attention deficit disorder of the soul. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

Basically, attention follows attachment. The stronger the attachment, the easier it is to secure the child's attention. When attachment is weak, the attention of the child will be correspondingly difficult to engage. One of the telltale signs of a child who isn't paying attention is a parent having continually to raise his voice or repeat things. Some of our most persistent demands as parents have to do with their attention: "Listen to me," "Look at me when I'm talking," "Now look here," "What did I just say?" or most simply, "Pay attention."

When children become peer-oriented, their attention instinctively turns toward peers. It goes against the natural instincts of a peer-oriented child to attend to parents or teachers. The sounds emanating from adults are regarded by the child's attention mechanisms as so much noise and interference, lacking in meaning and relevance to the attachment needs that dominate his emotional life. Peer orientation creates deficits in the child's attention to adults because adults are not top priority in the attention hierarchy of peer-oriented children.

It is no accident that attention deficit disorder was initially considered a school problem, a child's failing to pay attention to the teacher. It is also no accident that the explosion in the number of diagnosed cases of attention deficit disorder has paralleled the evolution of peer orientation in our society and is worse where peer orientation is most predominant - urba ~ Gabor Mate

The game is getting old, and I don't know if it's because I've mastered the art of it, or if I just have some weird attention-deficit-disorder when it comes to getting my way all the time, every time. ~ Kris Kidd

I would say that it's a lot easier, especially if you have a bit of an attention deficit disorder, to be on a movie because you can give it your all, and kill yourself for however many months, and then let it go. ~ Majandra Delfino

The way my brain processes information is quite odd. I mean, I have Attention Deficit Disorder and another learning disability I can't even spell. I don't even have a high school diploma. I'm smart, but you can't prove it on paper. ~ Ron White

But young parents, educated middle-class ones anyway, are very jumpy these days, they get so much information from the media about all the things that could be wrong with their child - autism, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, allergies, obesity and so on - they're in a constant state of panic, watching their offspring like hawks for warning signs. ~ David Lodge

I might be more kindly disposed to this ultra-secular notion that whenever bad things happen someone must be held accountable if a curious little halo of blamelessness did not seem to surround those very people who perceive themselves as bordered on every side by agents of wickedness. That is, it seems to be the same folks who are inclined to sue builders who did not perfectly protect them from the depredations of an earthquake who will be the first to claim that their son failed his math test because of attention deficit disorder, and not because he spent the night before at a video arcade instead of studying complex fractions. ~ Lionel Shriver

Since the 1980s, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) has been on the rise, not just among children, but now among the adult population as well.
The sudden rise of adult ADD, while it may have genetic components, certainly receives a major boost from our kinetic, hyper-speed, information-bombarded society. Victims of adult ADD are likely to initiate more tasks and projects that they'll ever finish, get bored easily, seek thrills readily, have a propensity to be late while loathing having to wait, and not be averse to taking foolish risks. ~ Jeff Davidson

I have attention deficit disorder, so sitting in a classroom is not the best thing for me. ~ Jeremy Miller

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss. ~ Nora Ephron

With my recovery programme, I have to do a daily inventory of how my day has been. I am terribly dyslexic and have attention deficit disorder, so I have to carry a tape recorder everywhere I go. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

I am a congenital optimist about America, but I worry that American democracy is exhibiting fatal symptoms. DC has become an acronym for Dysfunctional Capital: a swamp in which partisanship has grown poisonous, relations between the White House and Congress have paralyzed basic functions like budgets and foreign agreements, and public trust in government has all but disappeared. These symptoms are rooted in the decline of a public ethic, legalized and institutionalized corruption, a poorly educated and attention-deficit-driven electorate, and a 'gotcha' press - all exacerbated by digital devices and platforms that reward sensationalism and degrade deliberation. Without stronger and more determined leadership from the president and a recovery of a sense of civic responsibility among the governing class, the United States may follow Europe down the road of decline. ~ Graham Allison

Comic books are what novels used to be - an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal - and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit. ~ Charles McGrath

Children from like 8 and even up to the college age - Spider-Man appeals to a fairly broad demographic but, like I said, a mean age probably of 12 is a good mark - they process information so quickly and it's not because of attention deficit or short attention span. ~ Thomas Haden Church

Nobody's really happy. And as soon as society realises that you can't trust anyone and that hardship is a natural part of existence, the sooner the therapists will realise that they are worthless! Sorry. They have worth deficit disorder! ~ Christopher Titus

When you think about it, attention-deficit order makes a lot of sense. In this country there isn't a lot worth paying attention to. ~ George Carlin

My desire to experiment comes from my attention-deficit approach to cosmetics. I just get really bored, really easily. ~ Paloma Faith

Social media not only snatches your time, but it also teaches you attention deficiency. ~ Neeraj Agnihotri

Are you insane?" "Probably, yes," she said. "Empathy deficit disorder. Excessive violence. Something along those lines. ~ David Lagercrantz

By autistic standards, the "normal" brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail and routine. Thus people on the spectrum experience the neurotypical world as relentlessly unpredictable and chaotic, perpetually turned up too loud, and full of people who have little respect for personal space. ~ Steve Silberman

With attention deficit democracy, I am trying to wake up people to how the combination of mass ignorance, fear mongering by the government, and lying politicians is putting our entire system of government to a death spiral. ~ James Bovard

The pill for Insurance Deficit Disorder - aspirin. ~ Brian Spellman

Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It's a bad time to be right. ~ Joni Mitchell

If Jesus gives us a task or assigns us to a difficult season, every ounce of our experience is meant for our instruction and completion if only we'll let Him finish the work. I fear, however, that we are so attention-deficit that we settle for bearable when beauty is just around the corner. ~ Beth Moore

We need this help from the outside because we don't know how to to do this for ourselves. We start with a deep deficit - a chasm really - when it comes to understanding and being tolerant of ourselves, and that's even before we go forth to do battle with the rest of the world. As soon as someone judges, criticizes, dismisses, or ignores, the cycle of pain and reactivity ramps up, compounded by shame, remorse, and rejection. The act of validation, simply saying, 'I can see things from your perspective,' can short-circuit that emotional detour. ~ Kiera Van Gelder

He found he was suffering from laugh-deficit disorder. ~ Dean Koontz

The word "lesson" came back to Pooh as one he had heard before somewhere.
"There's a thing called Twy-stymes," he said. "Christopher Robin tried to teach it to me once, but it didn't."
"What didn't?" said Rabbit.
"Didn't what?" said Piglet.
Pooh shook his head.
"I don't know," he said. "It just didn't. What are we talking about?"
"Pooh," said Piglet reproachfully, "haven't you been listening to what Rabbit was saying?"
"I listened, but I had a small piece of fluff in my ear. Could you say it again, please, Rabbit? ~ A.A. Milne

I don't know if I'm attention deficit, but I certainly am easily distracted by other things. ~ James Vincent McMorrow

It's easy to blame the nature-deficit disorder on the kids' or the parents' back, but they also need the help of urban planners, schools, libraries and other community agents to find nature that's accessible. ~ Richard Louv

For a while, every smart and shy eccentric from Bobby Fischer to Bill Gate was hastily fitted with this label, and many were more or less believably retrofitted, including Isaac Newton, Edgar Allen Pie, Michelangelo, and Virginia Woolf. Newton had great trouble forming friendships and probably remained celibate. In Poe's poem Alone, he wrote that "All I lov'd - I lov'd alone." Michelangelo is said to have written "I have no friends of any sort and I don't want any." Woolf killed herself.
Asperger's disorder, once considered a sub-type of autism, was named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, a pioneer, in the 1940s, in identifying and describing autism. Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a "particular originality of thought" that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture of discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeard happiest when alone. The word "autism" is derived from autos, the Greek word for "self."
"The cure for Asperger's syndrome is very simple," wrote Tony Attwood, a psychologist and Asperger's expert who lives in Australia. The solution is to leave the person alone. "You cannot have a social deficit when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. All the diagnostic criteria dissolve in so ~ Michael Finkel

Poetry could be a brilliant antidote to some of our current cultural problems...our collective attention deficit. ~ Ian Gregson

If you're worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it's almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program. ~ Noam Chomsky

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly. ~ Lynne Truss

The difficult thing about practice isn't learning to sit for an hour, or sit for a weekend, or go on a three-month retreat, as hard as those things are. The difficult thing is to pay attention to what is happening right here and now. ~ Larry Rosenberg

The research suggests that praise may have [a negative, unintended] effect, directing attention away from the task [at hand] and toward your reaction. ~ Alfie Kohn

If you're very serious about writing it's helpful to find an agent. It's becoming more and more competitive to have your manuscript even looked at by an editor. Many companies don't accept unsolicited manuscripts anymore, so they'll pay more attention to something that comes in through an agent. ~ Ann M. Martin

He worries a lot and often suffers from feelings of self-doubt. He has a natural attraction to the melancholy side of life. He is drawn to the rain, the minor key, and to suffering. Hardship, infirmity, and misery gain his attention and fuel his passion for healing. ~ Sandra Nichols

Values create dimension, but color usually receives all of the attention. When painting with oils, placing dark and light pigments next to each other can be an accident waiting to happen. ~ Robert Warren

They slept little that night, making their newfound love like people for whom the world is running out. Fern did not think of her Task, not because she had abandoned it, but because she felt it would present itself for her attention when the moment was right, and until then she had an intermission, a suspension of hostilities, given by whatever gods there were. They lay in the cave while outside the tide rose and fell, and she thought that in this life and maybe in all lives she would remember that love sounded like the sea, and the beat of her heart was waves on a beach, and she would hear its echo in the nucleus of every shell. ~ Jan Siegel

Laws are made with such attention to protecting women that, if a man's constitutional rights conflict with a woman's protection, his rights disintegrate before her protection disintegrates. ~ Warren Farrell

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives ... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs. ~ Laura Miller

What we should care about is health - reduction of morbidity and mortality. Too often, we instead pay attention to whether something is 'normal.' A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins, even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off. ~ Alice Dreger

Take that rose bush, for example. We are all looking at the same plant, but our perception of it varies according to the way we each think and see. One person may see a vigorous rose, another may see a rose that could benefit from a little pruning, and a third may see a mess that no amount of attention would save. The rose bush isn't changing; it's the way we personally perceive it that differs, the way each of us thinks that colors our perception. ~ Sydney Banks

It had to be a book that held my attention and kept me wanting to read it; when my husband finished 'The Road', I started it straight away and didn't put it down until I finished - it was such an achievement and relief to know that I could read, comprehend and, most importantly, enjoy a book! ~ Rachel Tucker

He shook his head and thought about it for a second. "Maybe I'm not straight? Can I still be straight when I'm sitting here looking into your eyes?" he asked. Maybe it was the alcohol talking or maybe he wasn't as straight as he thought he was.
"Yes. Absolutely." Cormag nodded and watched him closely.
"Even when I think they're so pretty? They are, you know. So many different shades of brown ... and a little green. Just a touch; not a lot. So pretty." He sighed happily, watching those dark eyes staring back at him in surprise. He lay his head on his arms, smiling at the way Cormag flushed in embarrassment and turned his full attention onto his bottle of beer.
"Wow, you are super drunk. ~ Elaine White

His attention began to swing grandly through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn't anybody else there, or anything. There was just violet light
and a hum.
And then Billy swung into life again, going backwards until he was in pre-birth, which was red light and bubbling sounds. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

All subsidy measures, all schemes to redistribute income or to force Peter to support Paul, are one-eyed as well as shortsighted. They get their immediate appeal by focusing attention on the alleged needs of some particular group of intended beneficiaries. But the inevitable victims - those who are going to be asked to pay for the new handout in increased taxes (which directly or indirectly means almost everybody else) - are left out of account. Only one-half of the problem has been seen. The cost of the proposed solution has been overlooked. ~ Henry Hazlitt

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year. ~ Bill Gates

The stuff that I write doesn't work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play. ~ Aaron Sorkin

Focus your whole attention on heaven; become a citizen of heaven. ~ Sunday Adelaja

As far as I was concerned children had bipolar disorder. They were angry, unpredictable, emotional ambulance-sirens with pigtails, grubby hands and food-crusted mouths that twisted from smiles to frowns and back again as quick as a breath. No, thank you very much. If I wanted a three-foot warlord as my master, I'd hire a rabid monkey to do the job. ~ Tarryn Fisher

The moment feels laden with mystery and tension, as if for one second the world has agreed to pay attention to time itself. ~ Diana Abu-Jaber

Then these moments of perplexity began to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same form. They were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does it lead to? At first it seemed to me that these were aimless and irrelevant questions. I thought that it was all well known, and that if I should ever wish to deal with the solution it would not cost me much effort; just at present I had no time for it, but when I wanted to I should be able to find the answer. The questions however began to repeat themselves frequently, and to demand replies more and more insistently; and like drops of ink always falling on one place they ran together into one black blot. Then occurred what happens to everyone sickening with a mortal internal disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition appear to which the sick man pays no attention; then these signs reappear more and more often and merge into one uninterrupted period of suffering. The suffering increases, and before the sick man can look round, what he took for a mere indisposition has already become more important to him than anything else in the world -- it is death! That is what happened to me. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Stay at the center of your being without allowing your attention to become distracted by sensory stimulation. Be still and let your true nature manifest and shine through. ~ Ilchi Lee

Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation. ~ Lynne Truss

But that is love, isn't it? It's terribly inconvenient. It sweeps you up and stales your attention and slows down your work. our labors fall behind, our friends report us missing, and everything comes to a screeching halt! Everything, that is, except what truly matters in this life
true love. We've all been there. We know the feelings. So when we see it in a friend, a dear, dear friend, we throw down our work and we celebrate. We rejoice. We raise a glass. Because when we recognize it in the hearts of friends, it reminds us of how important it is in our own. Mr. Seven, you are and always have been my companion and friend. You have made me a better man, and almost on a daily basis you have reminded me that I too need to celebrate the love in my life. - William Charming ~ Michael Buckley

All noise is waste. So cultivate quietness in your speech, in your thoughts, in your emotions. Speak habitually low. Wait for attention and then you low words will be charged with dynamite. ~ Elbert Hubbard

The cow's point of view deserves more literary attention. ~ Mason Cooley

There's nothing more boring than a rock'n'roll star. Someone who has been on the road for 10 years, expecting attention wherever he goes, drinking himself stupid, who is obnoxious, incoherent, uncreative, and has a massive ego. There's nothing more pointless. ~ Thom Yorke