Quotes About Emotions

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

Just the way all mothers are crazy to their daughters, all mothers are wrong.

We are very happy. Or, no. We are not happy, exactly. But we love each other very much, and this charges our lives with shape and light.

Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.

It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife.

Rosaleen was a nuisance. Her children thought she was a nuisance because it was true. She was. A Nuisance. Rosalene was a nightmare. She was very difficult. She was incrasingly difficult. She made her children cry.

There was something out of kilter with his mother's happiness, as though a light had been switched on by a passing stranger, and left to illuminate an empty room.

He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down. 'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here?

And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.

Mrs. Van Daan's grizzling is absolutely unbearable; now she can't any longer drive us crazy over the invasion, she nags us the whole day long about the bad weather. It really would be nice to dump her in a bucket of cold water and put her up in the loft.

They mustn't know my despair, I can't let them see the wounds which they have caused, I couldn't bear their sympathy and their kind-hearted jokes, it would only make me want to scream all the more. If I talk, everyone thinks I'm showing off; when I'm silent they think I'm ridiculous; rude if I answer, sly if I get a good idea, lazy if I'm tired, selfish if I eat a mouthful more than I should, stupid, cowardly, crafty, etc. etc.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

You can be lonely even when you are loved by many people, since you are still not anybody's one and only.

But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.

As long as this exists, this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?

Memories mean more to me than dresses.

Irina harbors a resentment, almost an outright hatred of the West. She is a proud Russian

She misses the surety of Soviet patriotism that she grew up with,

Now I was beginning to understand how we could put horror in a little cubbyhole in our brains to deal with later.

Now I was beginning to understand how we can put the horror in a little cubbyhole in our brains to deal with later.

My tears brought no sense of release or relief. Their flight felt like the lightest, coldest touch of a departing lover.

Hurting people hurt people. And often the one who seems to get "cut" the most is the person lashing out. They nurse their pain, anger, bitterness, frustration, unforgiveness, or resentment until those emotions become their master and they are enslaved to them.

Run to God and cling to Him. God understands every verbal barb, every covert injustice, every emotional shard, every leering look, every jeering smirk. But He also keeps the books, and one day He will make everything right.

My God, can it be that nothing inside of us ever gets washed away? We go on living as if nothing at all had happened, then suddenly the poison deep in our hearts comes rising up to the surface.