Quotes About Attachment

Love could do that to some people, and they wouldn't even know how much they'd missed out on; they simply remained in place where love had left them, while the whole world spun around.

Over the years I had grown attached to it, as men grow attached to their miseries and their burdens.

Jet's hair was so tangled a brush would no longer go through it. She didn't bathe and ate only crackers and ginger ale. She slept with the edition of Emily Dickinson that Levi had given her. Inside he had written Forever—is composed of—Nows.

That was how you knew love. My mother had told me that. All you had to do as imagine your life without the other person, and if the thought alone made you shiver, then you knew.

wouldn't it be more likely that time was the element a spirit would be attached to? That would mean a ghost is an entity that can't let go of what was and isn't anymore.

Is it the man you want, or the feeling inside you when someone cares?

The worst thing in the world for a mother is to leave her child. She couldn't bring herself to remember you, because if she did she'd have to leave you behind.

Whatever belonged to you once, will always belong to you.

It's no good to need someone more than you want them.

Quando você quer alguém, essa pessoa tem poder sobre você.

The past stays with a man, sticking to his heels like glue, invisible and heartbreaking and unavoidable, threaded to the future, just as surely as day is sewn to night.

She was inexperienced enough to assume what they had was love because she wanted him, and want can be a hundred times stronger than need, and a thousand times stronger than common sense.

What belonged to you once, will always belong to you.

If love could tie you to a place from which you never wished to roam then wouldn't it be sensible to suppose that after death it might also tie the atoms that made you to that very same place?

She had packed two china teacups, wrapped in paper towels. She would not drink from anything else. He

I've spoken of the patient Peter who was obsessively forced to make conquests with women, to seduce and then to abandon them, until he was at last able to experience how he himself had repeatedly been abandoned by his mother.

If Bob had been able as a child to express his disappointment with his mother—to experience his rage and anger—he could have stayed fully alive. But that would have led to the loss of his mother's love, and that, for a child, can mean the same as death. So he "killed" his anger, and with it a part of himself, in order to preserve the love of his mother.

What is missing above all is the framework within which the child could experience his feelings and emotions. Instead, he develops something the mother needs, and although this certainly saves his life (by securing the mother's or the father's "love") at the time, it may nevertheless prevent him, throughout his life, from being himself.

This role secured "love" for the child—that is, his parents' exploitation. He could sense that he was needed, and this need guaranteed him a measure of existential security.

People who were loved in childhood will love their parents in return. There is no need of a commandment to tell them to do so. Obeying a commandment can never be the basis for love.

At the very first you were quite obviously and incomprehensibly indifferent toward me and probably for this reason seemed familiar.

Feelings of helplessness were mingled with long-dammed-up rage against the mother who had not been available to him when he needed her the most. As a result of becoming aware of these feelings, Peter could rid himself of a symptom that had tormented him for a long time; its point was now easy to understand. His relationships to women changed as his compulsion first to conquer and then to desert them disappeared.

My mother had a habit of hanging onto - even treasuring - the foibles of my distant infantile state.

I know how you love this place, he says to me, apologetically yet with satisfaction. And I don't tell him that I am not sure now whether I love any place, and that it seems to me it was myself I loved here - some self that I have finished with, and none too soon.