self-forgetting

And the length of the books — their uncompressed, occasionally boring plots — created a profound new version of the self-forgetting that the best stories give us.

As Prose, who is also a novelist, writes: "Who, exactly will suffer if, in that one tiny moment of self-forgetting, we help ourselves to the second or even third helping of pecan pie?"

Wiseman’s studies of people entranced, or stupefied, by Leonardos and Vermeers amount to a pictorial essay on self-forgetting: faces young and old, plain and fancy, each as vulnerable as that of a sleepwalker.

For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.

Our fellow-prisoners are often seen to be so absorbed in their own affairs that it is vain to seek light from them; but He, with patient, self-forgetting friendliness, is ever disengaged, and even elicits, by the kindly and interrogating attitude He takes towards us, the utterance of all our woes and perplexities.