Quotes About Detachment

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

Politics is not really my thing.

Never cry over anything that can't cry over you

She wanted to unzip her body and step out of it. She wanted to be attached to a machine that would erase her memory, obliterate her guilt, wipe her clean.

Prof stood apart from his family.

What we buy belongs to us only when the price is forgotten.

Anyway, dissociation is a great coping skill. It can keep you going and functional basically forever. The problems hit when it starts to break down, which is essentially as soon as you start to question your own detachment.

If she'd meant to shame him, it seemed to roll off like water from slate.

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seemed filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster

As for Thomas, the longer he lived, the less he cared for the world.

Everything that comes into Jean's view these days is met with this kind of abject indifference. She feels as thought she has exhausted her life's allotment of emotion, good and bad.

It was usual for Gervas Leigh to lose everything not actually attached to his person by a string, the habit of dissociation from material things being the first to be acquired by men of saintly character.

Art proper, in other words, emerges when sensation can detach itself and gain an autonomy from its creator and its perceiver when something of the chaos from which it is drawn can breathe and have a life of its own

When you take things personally, she knew, the world becomes very small. It is you and nothing is smaller. When you manage not to do that, the world opens wide.

The real point of watching television is to forget that you have a brain.

Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.

I want to care, but I don't. I look at you and all I feel is tired.

I didn't feel anything watching him go. I didn't even wish I did.

Maybe that means "letting them get away with it" -- but maybe it also means letting *you* get away *from* it.

Diogenes's quick wit and, dare we say it, cynical outlook disguised a first-class intellect focused on proving a single principle: that we have to own nothing, absolutely nothing, to be truly free.

In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.

Creo que en el mundo de hoy la única libertad posible es la indiferencia. Por eso seguiré viviendo con mi sable y mi caballo.

They will stare. They will stand to the side and watch her be alone.

In my room, I looked around at all the pieces of my life, neat and tidy on their little shelves, my clothes and books and telephones, my shoes and hair barrettes, and tried to care about them. Mine, mine, mine. But they were only things, things that could have belonged to anyone.