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Emotion Quotes


"Getting out of a marriage is rough, though, and not just for the legal / financial complications or the massive lifestyle upheaval. (As my friend Deborah once advised me wisely: "Nobody ever died from splitting up furniture.") It's the emotional recoil that kills you, the shock of stepping off the track of a conventional lifestyle and losing all the embracing comforts that keep so many people on that track forever."



"She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer."


"I don't want to lose you.' His voice almost a whisper. Seeing his haggard expression, she took his hand and squeezed it, then reluctantly let it go. She could feel the tears again, and she fought them back. 'But you don't want to keep me, either, do you?' To that, he had no response."


"You can feel anything. All is free for you to feel. But I guarantee you that if you allow yourself to feel envy and then to swim in it, that envy will destroy you and the people around you. Envy is unlike anger. Envy is not a right wing nor a left wing, it is not on either end of the balancing beam. Nobody needs it and I can assure you that once you give yourself to it, you will be eaten up. Envy can even eat up nations, casting them up against each other and pull a whole nation down into an internal collapse."


"I'm not using any word, Ronan said. The annoying thing about Ronan was always that he was angry when everyone else was calm, and calm when everyone else was angry. Because Blue was ready to bust a vein, his voice was utterly pacific. "I'm just telling you I'm not going. Maybe it's wrong, maybe it's not. My soul's in enough peril as it is."


"The greatest healing is forgiveness."


"He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!"


"When young people are insecure, they find ways to manufacture love tests " personal metrics to reassure themselves."


"The emotions attached to them were like sand castles in the tide, slowly washing out to sea."


"Every heart needs a cutting part sharper than a blade to stab agony."


"I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now."


"People write about "How they feel"... "Where they are now"..."


"I always feel when I meet people that I am lower than all, and that they all take me for a buffoon; so I say let me play the buffoon, for you are, every one of you, stupider and lower than I." He longed to revenge himself on every one for his own unseemliness. He suddenly recalled how he had once in the past been asked, "Why do you hate so and so, so much?" And he had answered them, with his shameless impudence, "I'll tell you. He has done me no harm. But I played him a dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him."


"Yes?""When you said you weren't angry...""Yes?""Were you?""I was rather annoyed," he admitted."But not angry?" She sounded as if she didn't believe him."Believe me, Henry, when I get angry, you'll know.""What happens?"His eyes clouded over slightly before he answered. "You don't want to know."She believed him."


"It was quite a sad thing,the way I watched you sleep like nothing could go wrong and I did not want to harm it, I did not want to blur it, but how could I notwhen everything I've ever known has slowly gone away."


"I have done what they expected of me. I have curtsied for my Queen and made my debut. This is what I have anticipated eagerly for years. So why do I feel so unsatisfied? Everyone is merry. They haven't a care in the world. And perhaps that is it. How terrible it is to have no cares, no longings. I do not fit. I feel too deeply and want too much."



"I think we cry to release the animal parts of us without losing our humanity. Becauseinside me is a beast that snarls, and growls, and strains toward freedom, toward Tobias, and, aboveall, toward life. And as hard as I try, I cannot kill it."


"If your heart is strong enough to hold grudges, then it is very capable of forgiving others. It takes more strength to hold onto something than to let it go."


"If you ate nails, your stomach would hurt, and it's a good thing that it would. Eating nails is deadly, thus the pain is helpful. Like this, sadness, anger, and anxiety are not to be feared or shamed, but listened to and decoded."


"Let your resistance, judgements, angers and fears inform you."


"If you put yourself in the emotion that you want from others, you are more likely to receive it."


"Nobody wants to know how you feel, yet, they want you to do what they feel."


"All the things that people do in order to show that they don't need anybody... meanwhile, all they really want to do is say, "Please keep me." We all want to be kept. The problem is we are too afraid to let anyone know about it. What are these fragile things in our hearts that have so much fear of being broken?"


"Hate spreads in the direction it is blown, but love spreads in all directions."


"I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire."


"When you smile, it means that your mind smiles; when you cry, it means that your mind cries!"


"What you love loves you back."


"All experiences, emotions, behaviors and beliefs, that make us humans, are the creation of various intricate and inexplicable molecular interactions within the brain."


"But how much love, oh, Lord, how much love I experienced at times in those dreams of mine, in those "escapes into everything beautiful and sublime. Even though it was fantastic love, even though it was never directed at anything human, there was still so much love that afterward, in reality, I no longer felt any impulse to direct it: that would have been an unnecessary luxury."


"Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of."


"Sometimes the things that are felt the most are expressed between two souls over the distance and over time...where no words abide. And others may speak freely, live with one another freely, express themselves freely" just like everyone else, but then there is you... you have no words for proof of reassurance, no tokens of professed love, but you have something. Something worth keeping."
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