Quotes About Emotions

What we think of as our "gut instincts" are really a very complex mosaic of past experiences, deep-seated hopes, fears, desires.

Shock is the stepsister of denial. It cushions the blow to your psyche when really fucked up things happen.

When you're young it's easy to confuse passion for love.

grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

We hate our parents for having their own lives, don't we, for making decisions for themselves that don't seem to take us into account. They're not people, not really. They're parents; how dare they live and love and die without us?

Never forget those first five minutes, when you thought how much you loved each other was the only thing that mattered. Because in truth it is the only thing that matters. That love is what gets you through all the other stuff.

I feel that familiar niggle of not wanting to disappoint anyone, ever, for any reason. Another female quirk, isn't it? Always be polite, meet expectations, smile when you don't want to, cry instead of getting angry. Be pleasing.

A word I read comes to mind: solastalgia, a miserable tangle of solace, desolation, and nostalgia.

People, no one tells you when you're young, fade as time passes without them—all the little qualities and tics, the happy times, the sweet moments, become blurry and vague. It's the bad things that stay with you, the ugly things that nag.

People only stay in your life if they want to. So often, they just go away. And there's really nothing you can do.

Sometimes it seemed like that was all it was, motherhood—grief and guilt and fear. You said good-bye a little every day—from the minute they left your body until they left your home.

It's not how we feel about someone that makes us love them, Annie, it's how they make us feel about ourselves.

Arguments are almost never about the thing they're about.

It's not focus, her lesser self whispered. It's selfishness. He doesn't think or care about anything that's not feeding his ego in that moment.

Emily thought maybe it was simpler than that: Some people gave money instead of love because it was all they had to give. A full bank account and a life of good deeds achieved with money didn't mean a full heart or a giving soul—often just the opposite.

But words are all we have, their essence the only passage into our centers, the only way we can make people feel what we feel

Anger, disappointment, sadness were the all-too-familiar horsemen preceding any encounter with her family.

Think of it as a little vacation your psyche takes when it has too much to handle. It's like a brownout, an overloading of circuits. Grief is a neurological event.

Grief and trauma, I remind myself, are not linear experiences. There are good days and bad ones, hard dips into despair, moments of light and hope.

What is it that they say? That thing about happy and unhappy families? That happiness is all the same, but misery is unique?

As far as Eloise was concerned, there were only two ways of being in the world. You either walked through life acting out of love, or you acted out of fear.

Anger is not the absence of love. Anger broke you apart. Love and anger wrap around each other and becomes one living thing inside your heart.

Mako, and even Hannah on a bad night, might engage with Sophia, leading to an all-out battle. Which was exactly what Mom wanted; it was sadly the only way she knew how to be intimate. It had taken a couple of years of therapy for Hannah to come to that particular realization.

Hateful feelings could crop up in a marriage, like weeds pushing their way through concrete. If you weren't vigilant, they took over quickly, like kudzu, depriving love of light and air until it withered and died. It was a slow, silent death, impossible to imagine in the heat of new love.