Quotes About Emotions

Don't you think it's strange that life, described as so rich and full, a camel-trail of adventure, should shrink to this coin-sized world? A head on one side, a story on the other. Someone you loved and what happened. That's all there is when you dig in your pockets. The most significant thing is someone else's face. What else is embossed on your hands but her?

The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two?

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt.

What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?

What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?

I've turned myself inside out to try and avoid what happened today. You affect me in ways I can't quantify or contain. All I can measure is the effect, and the effect is that I am out of control.

I love you. You've loved other people but you still left them. It's not that simple. I don't want to be another scalp on your pole.

It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.

Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.

If I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave the finale. Leave the grand statements. The simplicity of feeling should not be taxed. I can't work out what this will cost or what either of us owe. The admission charge is never on the door, but you are open and I want to enter. Let me in. You do.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.

The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it's the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.

Stories end in reverie, tragedy, or forgiveness.

In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.

Don't mix your heart with your liver.

I am civilised. My feelings are not.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about being happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is when I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence.

If the demons lie within they travel with you. Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.

Human beings often display emotions they do not feel. And they often feel emotions they do not display.

Wallowing is sex for depressives.

I say I appear naked before you, but so often I whistle for my invisible armed guard; the gap-toothed, jeering, club-headed mob, my feelings, that are used to having me to themselves.

It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening.

How long before the shouting starts? How long before the tears and the accusations and the pain? That specific stone n the stomach pain when you lose something you haven't got round to valuing? Why is the measure of love loss?