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Quotes About Emotions

And you love her, yes. But not too much." "Why do you say that?" "Because you are not mad, or wild, or grieving! You are not roaring out to choke her with your own bare hands! Which means your soul is not too mixed up with hers. And that is good. Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.
~ Donna Tartt
There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.
~ Donna Tartt
But though I knew just how lucky I was, still it was impossible to feel happy or even grateful for my good fortune. It was as if I'd suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone.
~ Donna Tartt
with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
~ Donna Tartt
I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back. But I wouldn't say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart.
~ Donna Tartt
You don't feel a great deal of emotions for other people, do you? I was taken aback. What are you talking about? I said. Of course I do. Do you? He raised an eyebrow. I don't think so. It doesn't matter, he said, after a long, tense pause. I don't, either.
~ Donna Tartt
In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person's soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.
~ Donna Tartt
But I didn't. And, in truth, it was maybe better that I didn't- I say that now, though it was something I regretted bitterly for a while. More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street- which was, of course, I love you.
~ Donna Tartt
But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.
~ Donna Tartt
As for Charles – well, basically, he likes girls. If he's drunk, I'll do. But – just when I've managed to harden my heart, he'll turn around and be so sweet. I always fall for it. I don't know why.
~ Donna Tartt
I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point. Are you happy here? I said at last. He considered this for a moment. Not particularly, he said. But you're not very happy where you are, either.
~ Donna Tartt
Her photographs, lining the hall outside my bedroom-- many different Pippas, at many different ages-- were a daily torment, always expected, always new; but though I tried to keep my eyes away always it seemed I was glancing up by mistake and there she was, laughing at someone else's joke or smiling at someone who wasn't me, always a fresh pain, a blow straight to the heart.
~ Donna Tartt
I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greak. ?????? ?? ????. Beauty is harsh.
~ Donna Tartt
In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way. I
~ Donna Tartt
Well, girls always love assholes," said Platt, not bothering to dispute this. "Haven't you noticed?" No, I thought bleakly, untrue. Else why didn't Pippa love me?
~ Donna Tartt
At home, my mother had known how to suffocate my dad's anger by growing silent, a low, unwavering flame of contempt that sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made everything he said and did seem ridiculous.
~ Donna Tartt
There were plenty of girls at school prettier than Harriet, and nicer. But none of them were as smart, or as brave. How could he make her love him, make her notice when he wasn't there?
~ Donna Tartt
It seemed the best thing was just to come right out and say it. 'You know,' I said, 'I'm really not attracted to you. I mean, not that -' 'Isn't that interesting,' he said coolly. 'I'm really not attracted to you, either.' 'But -' 'You were there.
~ Donna Tartt
It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.
~ Donna Tartt
BEFORE BORIS, I HAD borne my solitude stoically enough, without realizing quite how alone I was.
~ Donna Tartt
the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so forth
~ Donna Tartt
Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
~ Donna Tartt
We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother's funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn't work.
~ Donna Tartt
Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?
~ Donna Tartt