Quotes About Emotions

The coolness of Buddhism isn't indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place from which to regard the turbulence. From far away you see the pattern, the connections, and the thing as whole, see all the islands and the routes between them. Up close it all dissolves into texture and incoherence and immersion, like a face going out of focus just before a kiss.

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.

Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row - spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences - even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.

The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.

To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked.

I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.

The positive emotions that arise in those unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevents these goals from being achieved.

Even if we can't completely comprehend, we might care.

Certain kinds of beauty make people weep, the moments "when hope and history rhyme

Woolf disagrees, saying of the home, "For there we sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own experience.

if enjoyment is the right word for that sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive. We don't even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.

And yet the experience happens anyway. Again and again I have seen people slip into this realm and light up with joy. The lack of language doesn't prevent them from experiencing it, only from grasping and making something of it.

There is always someone whose suffering is greater than yours. The reproaches are often framed as though there is an economy of suffering, and of compassion, and you should measure yourself, price yourself, with the same sense of scarcity and finite resources that govern monetary economies, but there is no measure of either.

knowledge can numb as well as awaken feeling.

Nobody gets over anything; time doesn't heal any wounds; if he stopped loving her today, as one of George Jones's most famous songs has it, it's because he's dead.

The coolness of Buddhism isn't indifference but the distance one gains on emotions, the quiet place from which to regard the turbulence. From far away you see the pattern, the connections, and the thing as a whole, see all the islands and

Saying this upset some men. Many among that curious gender are easy to upset, and when they are upset they don't know it. They just think you're wrong and sometimes also evil.

The beauty of those places I are with me still. And in all of the dreams, as in my waking life, was the love of place. The sense that places were embodiments of emotions, where anchors were companions of a sort. Even protectors or parents.

As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time. Many versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will likely be rebuffed.  The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos, love into death, sometimes literally.

The notes danced through the June air; Vivi could feel them dust her hair and shoulders. She could feel the notes enter her and settle deep into her bones.

She breathed in the vast world of suffering and pure, dark love, and as she did, a well of compassion began to flow in her.

sadness usually does, as soon as I sat down and began to listen. The small press had a correspondingly

Mama parted with these Divine Secrets because I asked her to, Sidda thought. the reason I feel like crying, Sidda realized, is not just because this scrapbook is vulnerable, but because Mama, whether she knows it or not, has made herself so vulnerable to me.