Quotes About Detachment

One piece of advice that Don Juan gave to Carlos Castaneda was to do everything as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered, while all the time knowing that it doesn't matter at all.

When the worldly toys in which we foolishly place our hopes for happiness are taken away from us, our foolishness is also taken away, and this brings us closer to true happiness, which is not in worldly things but in wisdom.

This is a fine chance to let go, to "win my life by losing it," which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but nonattachment.

although I seldom knew what the date was. It didn't seem important. I was turning into a contented vegetable, maintaining sporadic contact with real life through telephone conversations with people in faraway offices.

There is no sense of loss in this transcendence of the quest to satisfy desires that previously seemed so important or of the pleasures that came from their satisfaction, for enlightenment involves detachment from one's desires.

But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn't matter.

We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.

All the Heebs asked was to be let alone; they simply did not want to be bothered by life, and each year they shed more and more of the complexities of living. Returned, Baines reflected, to the mere vegetable, which, to a Heeb, was ideal.

qué poco sano era sentir la ausencia de vida, no solo en esta casa sino en todas partes, y no reaccionar ... Antes eso era una señal de enfermedad mental. La llamaban ...

Lee was too cool by nature to rage at fate; his manner was to raise an eyebrow and greet it laconically.

Tony ate the rest of his pie and drank the sweet hot liquor without taking much notice of his surroundings, and the surroundings took little notice of him: he was too small to be a threat, and too stolid to promise much satisfaction as a victim. It

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist's success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a "narcissist," but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

I never wanted to be Protestant. Jews do, plenty of them. Not me. To be assimilated, to be respectable, to be detached like the Wasps, I understand the desire, but I knew never to try. I see all those distinguished Wasps with the beautiful gray hair and the pinstripe suits who don't have pimples on their ass. They're my lawyers....These guys are quiet. I don't want to be that way. I couldn't begin to be that way. I'm the wild Jew of the pampas. I am the Golem of the U.S.A.

Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.

Men who aren't enough like human beings even to hate—what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain.

Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it

I didn't know how Douglas and Mickey felt about the news, but the Earth seemed so far away now it didn't matter anymore. Maybe that was the wrong way to feel, but that's what I felt anyway.

When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachting. Hell, Pete was hardly 'in the world' in the first place. That was just the problem. He knew more about 13th century Sufi Orders and the Ptolemaic Universe than the rivers and hills and sewers and mills in southwestern Washington.

People are always separable.

The fewer connections you have to the world, the easier it is to leave.

detachment, n. Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it.

The only way to survive is to let some of them go.

I try to get the basic facts, not the details. The details can be interesting, but they can also distract me into attachment. The worst thing in the world would be to pretend to know the people whose lives I step through. They cannot be homes to me. They must be hotel rooms.

You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation mid-sentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you.