Quotes About Emotions

Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It's better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

I did upset the children. Not intentionally, but effectively.

The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.

What we notice in stories is the nearness of the wound to the gift.

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.

Unlike him she knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and her feelings hung inside her, preserved.

The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers.

I had thought about everything carefully before I had agreed to him. I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated; his heart and mine.

Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone.

Mrs. Winterson did not have a soothing personality. Ask for reassurance and it would never come. I never asked her if she loved me. She loved me on those days when she was able to love. I really believe that is the best she could do.

I am always wondering about love.

Being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love.

We gamble with the thought of winning. But it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us.

I was not so sure but too tired and too relieved to go further that night. To reach one another again had been far enough.

If someone liked me, I waited until she was off guard, and then I told her I didn't want to be her friend any more. I watched the confusion and upset. The tears. Then I ran off, triumphantly in control, and very fast the triumph and the control leaked away, and then I cried and cried, because I had put myself on the outside again, on the doorstep again, where I didn't want to be.

Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed.

What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.

At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.

I manage my own madness just as you do. And if my heart is broken it keeps beating. That is the strangeness of life.

Happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about 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.

I have learned, painfully, over the years that the things I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.