Quotes About Attachment

It wasn't a rock. It was a dog's rubber bone, left behind months ago to be buried first under autumn leaves, then winter snow. Just an old rubber bone, but Batty was already braced for what she knew would come—the rushing in her ears, the stab in her stomach, and the seeping away of the colors from her world. The soft blue spring sky, the yellow forsythia hedge, even Ben's bright red hair—all dulled, all gray and wretched.

Now Doon seemed to care for his new friends more than he did for her. Every time she thought about him she felt a thud of pain, like a bruised place inside her.

I said it grieved me to part from anything that mattered to me, yet I welcomed the grief because it meant I had felt deeply and needed to express it. 'I even had trouble leaving the Parthenon,' I told him ... 'because it was so beautiful and I knew I'd never see it again.

The attachment bond has shown that the language of infancy, which is emotionally laden and nonverbal, is such a powerful form of communication that it is responsible for shaping our mental, physical, and emotional development.

The ego is like a clever monkey, which can co-opt anything, even the most spiritual practices, so as to expand itself. (155)

Depression is fear with hope removed. It arises as we discover that something we thought could be ours will never be ours. Unhappiness is when we worry about not having something, depression is when we realize we'll never have it, and freedom is when we realize that nothing is ours and nothing can be ours, so that, in effect, nothing isn't ours.

An easy way to distinguish between caterpillars and butterflies is to remember that the enlightened don't attach importance to anything, and that enlightenment doesn't require knowledge. It's not about love or compassion or consciousness. It's about truth.

Unhappiness is caused when we cannot let go of our memories.

All human suffering is a variation on this theme—trying to control the waves, trying to control our present-moment experience so it conforms to our ideas and concepts of how it should be. If you want to suffer, compare this moment with your image of how it should be! I

Loving books is a good thing. A solid thing. Having a big collection of good ones is important, or at least it seemed that way on every single day until you moved, and then it seemed like one of the worst ideas you ever had.

Wanting things to be different from what they are is suffering. Attraction and aversion, greed and hatred, lust and ill will: These are the attachments that cause suffering. "I like that; I want more"—"I dislike this; make it stop": Letting go of these attachments is the end of suffering. Release from this unsatisfactory predicament is the goal of life, whether we are aware of it or not.

She'd probably be more upset over the loss of her phone than being kidnapped.

That's one of the problems with humans—that we can be talked out of loving something. That we can be talked out of loving something that we do, and we can be talked out of loving ourselves.

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

Early on, I had thought Wick was reaching for a body across the bed. But, for a long time, he had been reaching for me--for the person called Rachel, who did indeed, in the end, love back the person name Wick.

They'd never really been my friends; I didn't cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband.

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you. As

As long as we lean on anything outside ourselves for support, we are going to be insecure. Most of us try to find support by leaning on all sorts of things - gold, books, learning, sensory stimulation - and if these things are taken away, we fall over. To the extent that we are dependent on these external supports, we grow weaker and more liable to upsets and misfortune.

People who have strong likes and dislikes find life very difficult; they are as rigid as if they had only one bone.

For example, just a little time feeling hunger and crying or feeling cold and fussing helps an infant/body know his or her own wants. If the caretaker is feeding the infant/body before it is even hungry, it loses contact with its instincts. And if the infant /body is kept from exploring, it does not get used to the world.

only- we aren't always willing to make the exchange. We are apt to still cling to- our skeletons.

He was her life support and she didn't want to let go for fear of drowning.

THE BELOVED OBJECTS that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our illusions. Every

If you love something, set it free. If it was meant to be, it will come back to you. But this, of course, was bullshit. If you loved something and let it go...it would (hello!) find something else to love.