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Quotes About Emotions

These sociopaths,' he said. 'What do they feel like? Inside?' Isabel smiled. 'Unmoved,' she said. 'They feel unmoved. Look at a cat when it does something wrong. It looks quite unmoved. Cats are sociopaths, you see. It's their natural state.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
That, said Isabel, is the most painful feature of lost love. you wonder what the other person is doing. Right at this moment. What is he/she doing?
~ Alexander McCall Smith
Protestations of happiness could sound almost boasting to those whose happiness is incomplete. One did not boast of perfect skin to one affected by dermatitis; for the same reason, perhaps, one should take care in proclaiming one's happiness.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
I think that the measure of whether a life has been a good one is how much love there has been in that life--love both given and received.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
When you are with somebody you love the smallest, smallest things can be so important, so amusing because love transforms the world, everything. And was that what had happened?
~ Alexander McCall Smith
Isabel saw the intimacy of the gestures and felt immediately empty, a sensation so physical and so overwhelming that she felt for a moment that she might stop breathing, being empty of air
~ Alexander McCall Smith
the real poison within families is not the poison that you put in your food, but the poison that grows up in the heart when people are jealous of one another and cannot speak these feelings and drain out the poison that way.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn't matter.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
Irene gasped. Have you taken leave of your senses, Stuart? she hissed. Have you? Stuart closed his eyes. No, he said. Au contraire. It was strong language for the Edinburgh New Town, but he had to say it. Don't au contraire me, said Irene. But it was too late. He had.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
She shook her head. What was the point of anger? There were occasions when Mma Ramotswe, like all of us, could feel angry, but they were few - and they never lasted long. Anger, Obed Ramotswe had explained to her once, is no more than a salt that we rub into our wounds. She had never forgotten that - along with the things he said about cattle, and Botswana, and the behaviour of the rains.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, out favourite and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
She had to tell somebody, and Matthew would do. He would not be particularly interested, she knew, but she would tell him anyway. She had to share her joy, as Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
Moisturiser and a good cry: two things for modern men to think about.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
Everything is possible in love. In the heart of each of us there can be many rooms, and sometimes there are.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
It just did not make sense; unless, of course, as she had suggested, we all have a weak point, an area of intellectual or emotional vulnerability that may be quite out of keeping with out character.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
Telling a person with toothache that there are others with greater toothache than their own was no help at all.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
It is such an easy thing to do—to touch another in sympathy—but it is such a hard thing too.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
People talk of the wrench of parting, and that, he felt, was exactly what it was. Take a metal object off a magnet and one would experience that - there was the draw, the tug, the flow of the bond even through the air, and then the sudden detaching as separation occurred. That was what it was like. That was human parting. You felt it; you felt the separation, just as you would feel the rending of tissue being pulled apart.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
If only people could keep that in their minds—if they could remember that the people they met during the day had all the same hopes and fears that they had, then there would be so much less conflict and disagreement in this world. If only people remembered that, then they would be kinder to others—and kindness, Mma Ramotswe believed, was the most important thing there was. She knew that in the depths of her being; she knew it.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
I suppose that's the way affairs come to an end. Somebody grabs a fork and stabs the other in the hand. And that's it
~ Alexander McCall Smith
You know the best example of sincerity? The absolute gold standard? Who? Angus pointed to the door, outside which Cyril was waiting patiently. A dog. Have you ever met an insincere dog - a dog who hides his true feelings? Domenica looked thoughtful. And cats? Dreadfully insincere, said Angus. Psychopaths- every one of them. Show me a cat, Domenica, and I'll show you a psychopath. Textbook examples.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
It's how we read the face, said Ian. Remember that you're talking to a psychologist. We like to think about things like that. It's a question of numerous little signals that create the overall impression. But how do internal states who themselves physically? Very easily, said Ian. Think of anger. The knitted brow. Think of determination. The gritted teeth. And intelligence? Liveliness and engagement with the world.
~ Alexander McCall Smith
She had always believed that people who were nasty or unkind to others were only like that because there was something wrong in their lives, and that people who had something wrong in their lives were not to be despised or hated, but were to be pitied. So
~ Alexander McCall Smith