Quotes About Emotions

Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

Mostly, however, he had books about love. He believed in studying his own heart this way.

She had already—carefully, obediently—stepped through all the stages of bereavement: anger, denial, bargaining, Häagen-Dazs, rage.

My mother's capacity for happiness was a small soup bone salting a large pot.

She had expected a pistol to seem light and natural-a seamless extension of her angry feral self.

He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, always, say: Fine.

We curl up on the couch together, under a blanket, whisper I love you, I missed you, confusing tenses I think.

They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me.

I don't have a love life. I have a like life.' Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...

When affection fell on its ass, politeness could step up.

She tried to smile warmly but wondered if she looked fakey, something Ariel sometimes accused her of. Ariel had said. It's like you're trying to be happy out of a book. Millie owned several books about trying to be happy.

Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He will give you a hurt, hungry-to-learn look, with his James Cagney eyes. He will try to kiss you. Turn your head. Feel suffocated. (from How)

At home in Dellacrosse my place in the world of college and Troy and incipient adulthood dissolved and I became an unseemly collection of jostling former selves. Snarkiness streaked through my voice, or sullenness drove me behind a closed door for hours at a time.

While my scarcely controlled rage flew from my mouth in sentences I hoped would be, perhaps not then but perhaps later, like knives to her brain.

Losing confidence was more violent than losing love. Losing love was a slow dying, but losing confidence was a quick coup, a floor that opened right up and swallowed.

She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn't stand the sight of it.

You always say that, said Evan, but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you're quiet for a while and then you say you're fine, you're busy, and then after a while you say you're going crazy again, and you start all over.

There are lots of people in this world, Moss, but you can't be in love with them all.

Una vida así requería una autoestima exagerada. Suponía tener cantidades excesivas de esperanza y desesperación, y ponerlas al tuntún, como países tercermundistas del continente de las emociones.

She believes you can refuse to participate in certain emotions. "I like hamburgers but I don't eat them," she says. "Hamburgers are not an emotion," says Roz. "Yes they are," says Charis.

Life is sad, I thought. Here is someone.

At work you will be lachrymose and distracted. You will shuffle through the hall like a legume with feet. People will notice.

One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time. Their sadness occurred in isolation, lurched and spazzed, sent them spinning fizzly back into empty, padded corners, disconnected and alone.

What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on actual physical form, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse.