Holly Black Quotes

Those who are possessed by nothing possess everything.

I always preferred having wings to having things.

This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.

My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.

Home has always been wherever I am. I'm not very attached to walls - or people, for that matter - so I've always loved travelling around. A book in my back pocket, a diary, and a pen is all I need to call any place home.

I see what happens when one gets very attached to material things. That's just not what my life is.

I think there is a very powerful wish that we all have of being self-contained and having sort of opted out or choosing to remove ourselves from society and to have no ties and no obligations, and even no possessions. To be free in a particular way.

Other people have more than they need, I alone seem wanting.

Someone who goes with a half a loaf of bread to a small place that fits like a nest around him, someone who wants no more, who is not himself longed for by anyone else. He is a letter to everyone. You open it. It says, Live.

True affluence is to not need anything.

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.

Needing nothing really is the ultimate goal. And to have nothing to do with things.

To the degree we can live without the things of this world, we are wealthy.

All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you’ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect. That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody . . .

The less you need, the more you attract.

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.

There is nothing I can't live without. I learned this attitude when I was a child.

What I feel best about is that while I enjoy what I have and don't want to lose it, I also don't need it.

True affluence is not needing anything.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

I enjoyed my life when I had nothing... and kinda like the idea of just being happy with me.

I am totally unattached to material items.

O ye gods, grant unto me to have little and to want nothing.

The Dalai Lama was once asked for his favorite chant, and he said it was better not to have a favorite anything, which I think is a great thought.