I sit in my little office and I feel like I’ve got all my readers staring at me.
I went to a fashion show, and this silver-haired guy was staring at me with these piercing water-blue eyes. It scared me because I absolutely saw and knew my entire future.
By 30, I was separated from my husband, and I clearly remember sitting in my lovely office with a magnificent view, staring at a very lucrative pay stub, and bursting into tears because I was just miserable. So I had to make a decision: Keep following my plan, or be honest with myself and search for my true passion.
Even when I get on airplanes, very often, as I walk down the aisle, I notice a lot of people staring or whispering. I recognize the fact that yes, to a lot of people, I will always be that 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped and who was held captive.
I love watching TV, I probably spend too much time on my phone, but it’s probably not very good for your mental health is it? It indulges some of your worst personality traits, like staring at other people’s lives on Instagram for hours on end.
Death is staring too long into the burning sun and the relief of entering a cool, dark room.
People like Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony and M. L. K. are larger than life to me. I find myself staring at photographs of Lincoln almost in disbelief that he was a man who walked the earth and not merely some fiction writer’s creation.
The first sort of big present I remember getting from Santa Claus was quite a small telescope that I remember going into our backyard with my parents and figuring out how to assemble, and staring at the night sky, just for hours, with both of my parents.
For me, watching Mohamed Salah play football is not unlike staring up at the stars and contemplating the vastness of the universe: it makes my own life seem nice and small.
I used to do my best thinking while staring out airplane windows. The seat-back video system put a stop to that. Now I sit and watch old’ Friends’ and ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ episodes. Walking is good, but here again, technology has interfered. I like to listen to iTunes while I walk home. I guess I don’t think anymore.
Some of my songs are positive and stuff, but some are about staring down at the ground and obsessing about stupid things, and it is teenage in a way.
Well, when you’re nitpicking every little detail… with digital, you’re seeing what the finished product is, right there on set, and that’s when you start to lose a lot of time. You lose time staring at that image trying to make it perfect.
To me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter.
I guess the biggest thing I had to get used to was people staring. At first it was like, ‘Am I wearing something odd? Is there something on my face?’ It was kind of weird because when I go to the grocery store, people, they’re not necessarily coming up to me asking for a photo, they just… look at me.
I want you to think about your grandfather’s integrity and grit when you’re staring at the ceiling of your barracks room, but I also want you to think a little deeper.
I would drive home and see people wearing my No. 34 jersey and wonder why, because I didn’t feel worthy of that. And all the time I just knew people were staring at me, talking about me everywhere I went.
There was a whole display set up of all the X-Men paraphernalia. My wife couldn’t resist telling this 5-year-old boy that I was Wolverine. The little kid looked up at me and he was staring at me.
I didn’t want to go to college – I was bored by junior high. So I was in church one day, staring at the stained glass windows and thinking about things, when suddenly I decided that if I could start selling cartoons to magazines, they’d let me quit high school.
I was staring at a wall of photos and thought, ‘What would that sound like if it was music?’ And I guess that was the kicker. That’s what got me going.
When you’re literally staring at the person right in front of you, you’re connecting with them on a personal level. I even jump into the crowd sometimes and perform with them, sing into the mic with them and share the experience with them.
I’ve gotten stopped for reckless eyeballing, for staring too hard. These officers think they’re Tarzan and this is a jungle, that all the animals need to be tamed.
I was searching for a way to demonstrate 3D movement to my students and one day found myself staring into the River Danube, looking at how the water moved around the pebbles. This became the inspiration for the cube’s twisting mechanism. The fact that it can do this without falling apart is part of its magic.
You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.
Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.
I remember lying on the floor of my room, staring at a black-and-white television for most of the ’80s – watching ‘Diff’rent Strokes,’ ‘Facts of Life,’ ‘Silver Spoons,’ Saturday morning cartoons, and ‘Murder, She Wrote’ while eating an insane amount of Stouffer’s French bread pizza. I was sucked into it all.
I’m bored way too easily. I’m staring at screens half the day. I need to be overstimulated. And how will that express itself artistically?
There’s nothing better than just staring at a buttercup, struggling to make an impact on the world.
My kids have got to work themselves around my life, not the other way. That’s how kids become brats, if you’re there staring at them all the time going, ‘Are you alright?’
You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you’re staring into the grave.
I went to South Africa on safari and came eye to eye with a beautiful leopard. We were so close; I was staring at him for a long time and I felt a recognition with my own nature.
I am very lucky in my team. They sit opposite me, and I get to see them every day sitting there staring at the seating chart, not doing much. It is almost like a chess game.
I think music will always be a big part of my life. I can’t go five minutes without singing, sometimes unconsciously. And people stare at me, and I’m wondering why they’re staring, and then I’m realizing that I’m belting out a tune.
I hate going into a room with people in it and the feeling of them staring. I find every moment excruciating.
Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.
It never ceases to amaze me. I’ll be in a bank and I think the person staring at me is going to say, ‘I saw you in ‘Flying Doctors,’ or whatever. But instead they say, ‘You’re from ‘The Sound of Music.’
Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people’s characters.
Writing feels safe, you know, it’s a hard job, but at least you’re in your office or wherever you are and there’s no one standing over your shoulder staring at what you’re writing. And when you’re directing, everybody’s looking over your shoulder.
I didn’t know who was on the team, but I saw every eye as I walked down the aisle. It looked like a thousand eyes were staring right at me saying, ‘Who is this young punk?’ I just kept my eyes straight ahead.
We tend to block off many of our senses when we’re staring at a screen. Nature time can literally bring us to our senses.
I was working on this bedroom, and from where I was, in the beating hot sun, I could see Madonna’s castle on the next ridge over. It was hilarious – there I was, this Maritime carpenter, staring at Madonna’s castle. So it’s been a windy road.
For me, writing in public is actually super energizing and so much fun. Especially when writing can typically be really painful and certainly hard, and often, you’re staring at the page and thinking, like, ‘Uh, is this any good? What am I doing?’
When I take a knee, I am facing the flag with my full body, staring straight into the heart of our country’s ultimate symbol of freedom – because I believe it is my responsibility, just as it is yours, to ensure that freedom is afforded to everyone in this country.
I think actually performing on stage when everyone’s facing you and you’re one person facing them, that is quite a lonely thing in a strange way. You have to be quite insular from everybody else, you’ve got thousands of people staring at you and you’re just on your own.
When I drove up on the set one day, and they’d put up a sign that says ‘The Bill Engvall Show,’ I stood there for 20 minutes just staring at it. The director, James Widdoes, came up and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Look at this! There’s my name on a stage door in Hollywood!’
Learning how to deal with people and their reactions to my life is one of the most challenging things… people staring at me, people asking rude questions, dealing with media, stuff like that.
It takes minutes to play, but ‘Unmanned’ sticks with you for long after the credits roll. As a part of a two-man team for an unarmed drone, you experience one day in the life of this man who’s tired of staring through the camera of a drone flying around the Middle East and keeping his finger on the trigger.
