Quotes About Attachment

There is always another heart within the heart, for / what we own is never what we have, what we love / is never what we own — Richard Jackson, from "Francis' Prayer," Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018)

Maybe home isn't the place you love, just the place you know best.

put the book in my pocket and step away from his body. On one side, Janet takes my hand. On the other, Candy loops her arm in mine. Good thing. Looking at Vidocq lying there, I get that disembodied feeling again, like maybe if someone wasn't holding me I'd blow away on the breeze.

Perhaps one stops smoking only when one starts to love cigarettes, becoming so enamored of their charms and so grateful for their benefits that one at last begins to grasp how much is lost by giving them up, how urgent it is to find substitutes for some of the seductions and powers that cigarettes so magnificently combine.

Dear little house that I have lived in, there is happiness you have seen, even before I was born. In you is my life, and all the people I have loved are a part of you, so to go out of you, and leave you, is to leave myself.

We know that infant rats who receive more licking and grooming from their mothers are less fearful and more intelligent as adults, have better immune systems, and are more attentive mothers themselves.

In the end, we all lose it. Remember that. In the end, we own nothing.

The only way to remove pain from death is to remove love from life.

We can only lose what we have first claimed.

Bad memories can attach themselves like barnacles to the hulls of our lives. And, like barnacles, they have a disproportionately large amount of drag.

It is that to which we cling that drags us to the bottom of the abyss. There is real power at having nothing to lose.

I once heard it said that everyone needs love-and if they're denied, they'll find it, or a reasonable substitute somewhere.

Grief is the truest evidence of love. And we should always be grateful to have something to love, even if it means that we have to lose it.

La seule chose qui soit pire que la mort, c'est d'assister à celle des gens qu'on aime.

The ego hates losing – even to God.

The fears that assault us are mostly simple anxieties about social skills, about intimacy, about likeableness, or about performance. We need not give emotional food or charge to these fears or become attached to them. We don't even have to shame ourselves for having these fears. Simply ask your fears, "What are you trying to teach me?" Some say that FEAR is merely an acronym for "False Evidence Appearing Real." From Everything Belongs, p. 143

That common cold of the male psyche, fear of commitment.

We pull our boots on with both hands but we can't punch ourselves awake and all I can do is stand on the curb and say Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.

I don't really blame you for being dead but you can't have your sweater back.

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't want them, so I take them back and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists.

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't want them, so I take them back and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists.

You do this, you do. You take the things you love and tear them apart or you pin them down with your body and pretend they're yours.

This land, which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and gospel is free.

I wondered how people could live with things set in place, fixed, their places determined by the power of the recollection they contained, the memories they held. It was what made a home, I believed; the things we keep, the sum of us.