Detachment Quotes - Page 6

• Pain is always preferable to numbness.

  Scott Anderson

  Pain, Numbness, Emptiness

  Scott Anderson (1999). “Triage: A Novel”, p.179, Simon and Schuster

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Evil, Dubious, Faces

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1992). “The Astonishing World: Essays”, Houghton Mifflin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Susan Sontag

  Tragedy, Comedy, Ifs

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Peace ... was contingent upon a certain disposition of the soul, a disposition to receive the gift that only detachment from self made possible.

  Elizabeth Goudge

  Self, Soul, Made

  11 Copy quote

• Without discipline and detachment, an actor is an emotional slob, spilling his insides out. This abandonment is having an unfortunate vogue. It is tasteless, formless, absurd. Without containment there is no art. All this vomiting and wheezing and bursting at the seams is no more great acting than the convulsions of raving maniacs.

  Bette Davis

  Art, Emotional, Discipline

  Bette Davis (1962). “The lonely life: an autobiography”, Putnam's

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

  Sylvia Plath

  Baby, Stars, Wall

  Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror - for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Real, Writing, Race

  Letter to "Weird Tales" editor Edwin Baird, printed in "Weird Tales" 3, no. 3 (March 1924); Quoted in "Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters" edited by S. T. Joshi, (p. 122), 2000.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nobody has ever been able to experience what they have thoroughly understood - or understand what they have experienced until they have achieved a detachment that renders them incapable of repeating the experience.

  Zelda Fitzgerald

  Understanding, Experience, Able

  Zelda Fitzgerald (1992). “The Collected Writings”, New York : Collier Books ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; New York : Maxwell Macmillan International

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• One detects creative power by its capacity to conquer one's detachment.

  Marianne Moore

  Creative, Conquer, Capacity

  Marianne Moore (1994). “Complete Poems”, p.53, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The property of the estate owners (pomeshchiks) doesn't belong to any particular detachment, but to the people as a whole. Let the people take what they want.

  Maria Nikiforova

  People, Want, Owners

  "Atamansha: the Story of Maria Nikiforova, the Anarchist Joan of Arc" by Malcolm Archibald, Dublin: Black Cat Press, (p. 24), 2007.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Yoga is an ancient discipline in which physical postures, breath practice, meditation, and philosophical study are tools for achieving liberation. In my interpretation, achieving liberation in yoga means learning how to be present with everything that arises, whether it is pain or pleasure, sadness or joy, failure or success. And to be present with whatever arises, I believe we must not only be aware of what is arising but we must also be able to see all things that arise as equal, with detachment.

  Rodney Yee

  Pain, Believe, Yoga

  Rodney Yee (2004). “Moving Toward Balance: 8 Weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee”, p.9, Rodale

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Even if you have not awakened, if you realize that your perceptions and activities are all like dreams and you view them with detachment, not giving rise to grasping and rejecting discrimination, then this is virtually tantamount to awakening from the dream.

  Muso Soseki

  Dream, Views, Giving

  14 Copy quote

• The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Rap, Imagination, Feelings

  H.P. Lovecraft, Digital Papyrus (2016). “H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection (160 Works Including Early Writings, Fiction, Collaborations, Poetry, Essays & Bonus Audiobook Links)”, p.1681, eBookIt.com

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.

  Doris Lessing

  Hate, Years, Important

  Interview with Jonah Raskin, progressive.org. November 19, 2013.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• [When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Memories, Confused, Moving

  5 Copy quote

• There is nothing harder to come by than detachment and solitude; and nothing more important.

  Marya Mannes

  Solitude, Important, Harder

  5 Copy quote

• If you want to be powerful in life you have to enjoy the process. You have to get pleasure out of making the thing that you're making. There has to be that kind of purpose behind it. If your purpose is simply gaining power, if that becomes your end in life then you end up sort of destroying yourself because you lose the sense of detachment that's very necessary.

  Robert Greene

  Powerful, Purpose, Want

  Source: bigthink.com

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• Several decades ago, a detachment of the American right cut itself loose from reason, and it has been drifting along happily ever since. If the birthers are more evidently kooky than the global-warming "skeptics" or the death-panellers or the supply-siders or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, they are, in their fundamental disregard for the facts, actually mainstream.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Cutting, Fundamentals, Facts

  "The Things People Say" by Elizabeth Kolbert, www.newyorker.com. November 2, 2009.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I want to care, but I don't. I look at you and all I feel is tired. I walk through school and all I want to do is leave. I wake up in the morning and don't know why I'm here. I feel like I'm not real.

  Elizabeth Scott

  Morning, Real, Tired

  8 Copy quote

• I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Le  vi- Strauss inTristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference.

  Pierre L. van den Berghe

  Distance, Political, Suffering

  'From the Popocatepetl to the Limpopo', collected in Bennett Berger (ed) Authors of their Own Lives (1990).

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

  Susan Sontag

  Emotional, Giving, Understanding

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.100, Macmillan

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• Both religions and musicals work best with energetic and committed believers. Cynicism or detachment would have destroyed the magic - something true of religion, too.

  Lisa Randall

  Magic, Cynicism, Committed

  4 Copy quote

• Detachment, lack of sentimentality, originality, a lot of things that sound rather empty. I know what they mean. Let's say, "visual impact" may not mean much to anybody. I could point it out though. I mean it's a quality that something has or does not have. Coherence. Well, some things are weak, some things are strong.

  Walker Evans

  Photography, Strong, Mean

  4 Copy quote

• In the desert the detachment of life from all normal intercourse imparts a sense of gravity to every rencontre, and each touch with human beings is fraught with a significance lacking in the too hurried intercourse of ordinary everyday life. On the desert track, there is no such thing as a casual meeting.

  Mildred Cable

  Track, Everyday, Normal

  Mildred Cable, Francesca French (1944). “The Gobi Desert”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Gratitude, War, Men

  J. Robert Oppenheimer's letter to his brother Frank Oppenheimer (March 12, 1932), as quoted in "Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections" edited by Alice Kimball Smith (p. 155), 1995.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source