Mental Detachment Quotes

Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.

I've also grown as an actor as I've got older in life. I've learnt how to go to work, immerse myself 100 per cent in the character and, at the end of the day, take it all off and go back, get a nice bubble bath, have a nice massage and realise that is not my life. And that feels good.

In making certain things easier for people, technology has actually demotivated people from using their brains. We have all these devices that keep us connected, and yet we're more disconnected than ever before. Why is that?

When I go on the plane to fly home, I'm literally capable of forgetting what I do for a job. That also comes about because I choose to take massive breaks between projects, and because I choose to do this ridiculous thing of keeping home, home.

I'm quite good at switching off and sometimes I forget who I am in a character.

I think intellectualization is what's killing most people.

We forget our health and comfort and notice a pinching shoe. Much of living well is detaching from our boring stories of pain and shifting focus

Shock is a merciful condition. It allows you to get through disaster with a necessary distance between you and your feelings.

I have definitely had experiences where I can feel the shift from simply living my life to being slightly outside of my life and taking notes.

Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.

O teach me how I should forget to think (1.1.224)

But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.

He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.

In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.

People become writers in the first place by those things that hurt you into art, as Yeats said it. Then they become separated from what started out affecting them. Journalism forces you to look at the world so you don't get cut off.

You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.

When you become detached mentally from yourself and concentrate on helping other people with their difficulties, you will be able to cope with your own more effectively. Somehow, the act of self - giving is a personal power - releasing factor.

Each time I sit down and write a play I try to dismiss from my mind as much as I possibly can the implications of what I've done before, what I'm going to do, what other people think about my work, the failure or success of the previous play. I'm stuck with a new reality that I've got to create.

I wished there was some kind of switch on my brain. That I could turn it off in the same way that I could turn off the television. Just click it off and immediately empty my mind of all these images and worrying thoughts. And simply leave a blank screen. Or if I could just remove my head and put it on the bedside table and forget about it until morning. And then attach it again when I needed it.

I never ever see a film of mine after I release it to the public. I see it when I shoot it in my dailies and while I'm editing it, re-editing it and reshooting it and all that. By the time it's finished I never want to see it again.

When I started working on 'Michael And Michael,' it was my life for three to four months, and then suddenly it's gone.

A quiet mind does not mean that there will be no thoughts or mental movements at all, but that these will be on the surface, and you will feel your true being within, separate from them, observing but not carried away

To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.

But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.

Can I reject everything my brain experienced? Is intellectual understanding any understanding at all?