Quotes About Detachment

I don't miss acting. I don't even see movies. I don't see plays. I don't watch television.

The great part, or the interesting part, is that when you stop eating something, you stop missing it.

When you are not missing something, longing for something, you don't really think about it that much. It's like that girlfriend you don't want to have anymore. You don't think about her anymore. Or ex-husband. You just don't.

I was initially excited about modelling, but soon, I started feeling detached with the job. I wanted dynamic growth in whatever I did.

When I wake up on a Monday morning, it's nice knowing for the next 10-12 days that I don't have to do much of anything if I don't want to.

I have this morbid fascination with being completely alienated from everybody, and a lot of the time I really do feel that way.

You know people like this, right? People who are incapable of enjoying anything.

The pedestrian is the highest and most mighty of beings; he walks for pleasure, he observes but does not interfere, he is not in a hurry, he is happy in the company of his own mind, he wanders detached, wise and merry, godlike. He is free.

To approach sex carelessly, shallowly, with detachment and without warmth is to dine night after night in erotic greasy spoons. In time one's palate will become insensitive.

James] Joyce... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized....

She floated near but outside her own body, feeling vague and intense at the same time. Needing nothing. Being what there was.

Long ago she had given up trying to be deft or profound or anything in the company of people she was not interested in, who didn't thrill her.

It sounds to me, dear, as if your satirist is a bit like a monk. They both take a rather dim view of the world, and both try to do something about it. Thank you, Father Joe! I think I knew that once, but I'd forgotten. Contemptus mundi . We both have contempt for the world. You p-p-persist in your error, my son. Contemptus does not mean 'contempt.' It means 'detachment.' Are you detached from the things you satirize?

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.

He remains kind, but a feeling nags at me, staying with me long after I leave. And it's this: It doesn't matter what I did to him. He can choose to remain detached, untouched by me. Something I can't do back.

The call to self-emptying will always be unpopular to those whose pockets and closets are full. What

Every year I own less of what I use. Possession

Your principle should be to see everything and say nothing. The world changes so rapidly that if you want to get on you cannot afford to align yourself with any person or point of view. Even if you feel strongly about something, learn to keep silent.

He seemed unaware of what was going on, stared out without hope or ambition, without worry, developing a quality devoid of qualities to get him through this life.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, one cannot do without in life. All wants are dispensable as long as one can absent oneself.

But if detachment is really fear of failure and hence never putting oneself to the test, or if it's fear of being hurt, humiliated or rejected, then one is closing all doors to life, to the possibilities of happiness, pain, dejection, achievement and experience. Reincarnation may be on the cards for most of us but we live this particular life, whether it is maya or whatever else, only once. This is our only chance to engage it. Excess

You are welcome to your intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers welcome, too, to your bars and your whisky that only makes me ill. Here am I in the forest, quite content.

Why is it so hard to say good-bye to something even when you know it's a slow-growing cancer?

Actually I do know. Now ask me if I care.