Detachment Quotes - Page 8

• Our detachments move us toward freedom and death.

  Mason Cooley

  Moving, Commitment

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• I believe that you've created a metaphorical universe in which you can express your darkest fears. In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Jobs, Believe, Reality

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2009). “Wintergirls”, p.185, Penguin

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• I am overcome by a feeling of complete detachment. I am a mere object to these people. I am barely human any more.

  Tabitha Suzuma

  People, Feelings, Overcoming

  Tabitha Suzuma (2012). “Forbidden”, p.417, Simon and Schuster

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• All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, my numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn't go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.

  Hanif Kureishi

  Depression, Crush, Letting Go

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• Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

  Sylvia Plath

  Depression, Fall, Eye

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.155, Anchor

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• I've never been passionate about acting, and I find more and more that I work to live the life I want to live. [...] There's something about the detachment I have, the feeling of the lack of importance about what I do, that is healthy.

  Jeremy Irons

  Live Life, Healthy, Feelings

  "King of all his castles" by Elaine Lipworth, www.nzherald.co.nz. May 14, 2005.

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• So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between 'It hurts to be alive' and 'I can see a million miles from here.' A good poetic voice can do both at once.

  Tony Hoagland

  Beautiful, Running, Hurt

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• Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence.

  Guy Debord

  Army, Police, Violence

  Guy Debord, Ivan Chtcheglov, Asger Jorn, Raoul Vaneigem, Mustapha Khayati (2014). “Situationism: A Compendium”, p.33, Bread and Circuses Publishing

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• The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It's kind of rude, and yet really it's where art comes from. It's not the same as courage. It's closer to bad manners than to courage. If you're going to be a writer, you basically have to say, 'this is just who I am'. There's a certain indefensibility about it. It's not about loving your community and taking care of it — you're not attached to the chamber of commerce. It's a little unsafe. You have to be willing to have only four friends, not 11.

  Lorrie Moore

  Art, Who I Am, Loving You

  "Lorrie Moore" by Louisa Kamps, www.elle.com. September 16, 2009.

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• Detachment is a flaw, not a virtue-don’t you realize that?

  Steven Erikson

  Realizing, Flaws, Virtue

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• No one, it has been said, will ever look at the Moon in the same way again. More significantly can one say that no one will ever look at the earth in the same way. Man had to free himself from earth to perceive both its diminutive place in a solar system and its inestimable value as a life -fostering planet. As earthmen, we may have taken another step into adulthood. We can see our planet earth with detachment, with tenderness, with some shame and pity, but at last also with love.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Taken, Moon, Men

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• Woman's soul is present and lives more intensely in all parts of the body, and it is inwardly affected by that which happens to the body; whereas, with men, the body has more pronoucedly the character of an instrument which serves them in their work and which is accompanied by a certain detachment.

  Edith Stein

  Character, Men, Soul

  Edith Stein (2012). “Edith Stein Essays on Woman”, p.63, ICS Publications

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• The perfection of yoga is to become detached. And the perfection of detachment is to become completely attached, attached to God.

  Radhanath Swami

  Yoga, Perfection, Detached

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• However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.

  Michael Foley

  Believe, Silence, Solitude

  Michael Foley (2010). “The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be Happy”, p.77, Simon and Schuster

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• Those who conquer their minds are beings of renunciation and detachment. They are beings of renunciation and detachment they are lovingly focused on the True One, they realize and understand themselves.

  Guru Nanak

  Mind, Realizing, Conquer

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• Detachment is the ultimate pleasure.

  Saraha

  Pleasure, Ultimate

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• By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Essence, Names, Giving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.192, Penguin

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• Is not virtue a negation of becoming?

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Attachment, Becoming, Virtue

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• Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest. Such is My counsel to you, O concourse of light!

  Bahá'u'lláh

  Light, Land, Essence

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• Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.

  Haruki Murakami

  Numbness, Emptiness, Bitter

  Haruki Murakami (2011). “Kafka On The Shore”, p.426, Random House

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• Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.

  Heather O'Neill

  Numbness, Self, Able

  Heather O'Neill (2014). “Lullabies for Little Criminals”, p.139, Hachette UK

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• It's important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Distance, Fall, Numbness

  "Girl, Interrupted". Book by Susanna Kaysen, 1994.

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• Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.

  Douglas Coupland

  Believe, Numbness, People

  "Girlfriend in a Coma". Book by Douglas Coupland, 1998.

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• I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.

  William Styron

  Numbness, Body, Normal

  William Styron (1990). “Darkness visible: a memoir of madness”, Random House Incorporated

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• I'm up all night against my will My medicine won't let me feel anything at all The doctor gave me sleeping pills and I took one Then I feel all alone, sleeping like a stone.

  Joseph Arthur

  Sleep, Night, Numbness

  Song: Your Are The Dark, Album: Redemption's Son, 2002

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