attachments.

Real peace will arise spontaneously
When your mind becomes free of attachments,
When you know that the objects of the world
Can never give you what you really want.

  --  Theragatha, from "Buddha Speaks," edited by Anne Bancroft, 2000, Shambhala Publications

For years I thought spiritual life was about some special state of perfection or enlightenment. It is really about releasing attachment.

  --  After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, by Jack Kornfield

Don't confuse nonattachment and freedom with running away. Your idea of leaving your family and children to renounce the world is like running from your shadow. This is false emptiness. There is nowhere you can go that is any more or less empty than your own house. Enlightenment has been here from the start.

  --  a Chinese Chan master quoted in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, p. 218, by Jack Kornfield

Life is not suffering; it's just that you will suffer it, rather than enjoy it, until you let go of your mind's attachments and just go for the ride freely, no matter what happens.

  --  the character Socrates, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, by Dan Millman

The more our spiritual practice, our meditation, and our daily activity are congruent with desirelessness and nonattachment - the less inflexible, demanding, selfish, and greedy we are - the more nirvana starts to creep in, almost insidiously.

  --  (2, p.88)

Overcoming attachment does not mean becoming cold and indifferent. On the contrary, it means learning to have relaxed control over our mind through understanding the real causes of happiness and fulfillment, and this enables us to enjoy life more and suffer less.

  --  How to Meditate, by Kathleen McDonald

attachment links.

• A View on Buddhism: Attachment -- "If the basic project of mainstream Buddhist practice is to unmask the ego illusion for what it is, one of the main prongs of attack is directed against desire. Desire gets a very bad press in the Buddhist scriptures. It is a poison, a disease, a madness. There is no living in a body that is subject to desire, for it is like a blazing house.
  
  Now, desire lives and grows by being indulged. When not indulged by the application of ethical restraint and awareness, on the other hand, it stabilizes and begins to diminish, though this is not an easy or comfortable process, for the old urges clamor for satisfaction for a long time.
  
  This kind of practice cuts directly against the main currents of modern consumer society, where desire is energetically encouraged and refined to new pitches and variations by the powerful agencies of marketing and publicity. But it also cuts against the more moderate desires-for family, wealth, sense-pleasures and so on sanctioned in simpler, more traditional societies, including the one into which the Buddha was born. We can never be at peace while desire is nagging at us."
• Buddhism in Daily Life: Desires and Enlightenment -- "People encountering Nichiren Buddhism for the first time are often surprised by the stance taken toward desire which seems to contradict prevailing images of Buddhism. For many, Buddhism is associated with asceticism, and indeed there are many schools and traditions which stress the need to eliminate desire and sever all attachments.
  
  Needless to say, a life controlled by desires is miserable. In Buddhist scriptures, such a way of life is symbolized by "hungry demons" with giant heads and huge mouths, but narrow, constricted throats that make real satisfaction unattainable. The deliberate horror of these images grew from Shakyamuni Buddha's sense of the need to shock people from their attachment to things-including our physical existence-that will eventually change and be lost to us. Real happiness does not lie here, he sought to tell them..."
• Buddhism and Thai culture -- "The second type of Emptiness is psychological; this one is more important than ontological Emptiness and is more relevant to Buddhism. Psychological Emptiness is the state of the mind Empty of all attachments to all dualistic thinkings. In fact, Buddhism asserts that all human's sufferings are due to attachments to dualistic thinking. After all, it is the discriminating mind that tell us that things are impermanent and of suffering nature. An enlightened buddhist is said to not attach even to the Ultimate Truth which s-he attained. To be permanently Empty is to attain buddhist enlightenment (Nibbana, Nirvana). Buddhist values wisdom so much that the pure form of which is said to be the one that drives an enlightened buddhist. The wisdom uses all the dualistic thinking to its advantage without being attached to them in the same manner as the lotus plant deriving its existence from the water in which it embeds , without being wetted by it. To work with an Empty mind should be the most productive and creative way to work..."

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