Quotes About Detachment

7. Kill out the hunger for growth.

He liked such sharpness, for there was nothing in him that had any blood you might spill.

He wanted to see how moonish I was over him. But all the sop in me was gone. I did not lie dreaming of him during the days, I did not speak his name into my pillow.

There are lives to be lived if only you didn't care. Care for what, for what; the opinion of mankind, money, success, hotel lobbies, health, umbrellas, Uneeda biscuits . . .?

She breathes all the political gases that flow around this, but she never seems to inhale them.

a metaphysical sense of being marooned

FALDER is sitting exactly opposite to the JUDGE, who, raised above the clamour of the court, also seems unconscious of and indifferent to everything.

Mary watched everything as a mere spectator.

She felt detached from her family, and thought it strange how they had lavished so much attention on her, as a child, and then at some appointed, prearranged time they seemed to stop the flow of affection and being the expectations - as if, for a brief phrase, you were expected to absorb love (and get enough), and then, for a much longer and more serious phase, you were expected to fulfill certain obligations.

But I tried to feel I was part of the demonstration; sadly, I didn't feel I was a part of it—I didn't feel I was part of anything. I had a 4-F deferment; I would never have to go to war, or to Canada. By the simple act of removing the first two joints of my right index finger, Owen Meany had enabled me to feel completely detached from my generation.

After all, I do not believe that one must necessarily scrape bottom, as it were, in order to view his society subjectively. Rather than moving vertically downward, one may move horizontally outward toward a point of sufficient detachment where a modicum of creature comforts are not necessarily precluded.

I really have had little to do with them, for I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.

Please don't spoil my day; I'm miles away and, after all, I'm only sleeping.

Precisely because [historians'] detachment from and elevation above the landscape of the past, historians are able to manipulate time and space in ways they never could manage as normal people. They can compress these dimensions, expand them, compare them, measure them, and even transcend them, almost as poets, playwrights, novelists, and film-makers do. Historians have always been, in this sense, abstractionists: the literal representation of reality is not their task.

Last words when sending our boy to college: "If there's anything you want call us and we'll show you how to live without it."

Emotional attachment to Maya is totally painful, this is a bad bargain.

I'm growing very talented at watching blood and guts on screen because I have zero emotional response.

How seek the way which leadeth to our wishes? By renouncing our wishes. The crown of excellence is renunciation.

I am willing to let go. I release others to experience whatever is meaningful to them, and I am free to create that which is meaningful to me.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

We don't experience the world fully unless we are willing to give everything away.

The 30-year-old male is about as far away from Valentine's Day as you can get in the human experience.

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

I don't want to get attached to anyone anymore. It only destroys me in the end.