Quotes About Emotions

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human, Eden used to say. I didn't know what she meant then. My heart had been broken lots of times, and I was supposed to say thank you? Now, all these years later, I'm at least starting to see that she was really talking about the whole journey. That it's impossible to be alive and not get hurt sometimes, not if you're doing it right.

Who, when you got right down to it, knew a goddamned thing about love?

What we can't bear to know or feel, we often find a way to hide from ourselves, and hide well.

I wish I could break into pieces," I told him one night, just a week after I'd come back. "That would feel better somehow. Isn't the worst when you can keep on walking and breathing and writing letters and going to the market and all the things you do when you're alive, but really you're blown apart?

Was my happiness so completely tied to him now that I could only feel like myself when he was near?

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human.

I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.

The accordion and the whores and the retching,' he said. 'That's our music.

He didn't know how love managed to be a garden one moment and war the next.

I didn't quite know what to say. Kitty was one of the most poised and self-confident women I'd ever known, and here she was knocked off her feet and set spinning.

If the raging waters had reached out to swallow me, I would have let them. I wanted to die that day—I did—and there'd been other times, too. Not many, but they were there, and as I watched Ernest twitch in an uneasy sleep, I couldn't help wondering if we all had them. And if so, if we survived them, was it by chance alone? Hours

It was possible that all men were difficult to read, but I had to live with Jock through every long

I'm hoping it gets easier at some point," I told him. "I still feel awful about the things we said. The things we didn't say. Do you think it's possible to make peace with the past?" "Hell. You can try, I guess. But I'm not sure anyone gets forgiven. Not even then.

Until a few months ago, it had been my general understanding that if you were a writer, you pummeled your own soul until some words trickled out of the dry streambed, enough to fill a saucer or a teaspoon or an eyedropper. And then you wept a little, or gnashed your teeth, and somehow found the fortitude to get up the next day and do it again.

And if I tried to talk to him or, God forbid, ask him to take it easy on the whisky, he'd lash out. "Oh, sod off, Beryl. It's all easy for you, isn't it?

His departure had been months and months in coming, and still I wasn't nearly ready.

A red-jacketed porter hurried by me with a heavy steamer trunk, and I felt a rushing up of memory. At four, I had stared at the shrinking train that carried my mother away, black smoke rising, distance between us stretching by the moment.

Her absence was still so loud and so heavy, I ached with it, feeling hollow and lost. I didn't know how to forget my mother any more than my father knew how he might comfort me.

Was my happiness so completely tied to him now that I could only feel like myself when he was near? I had no idea.

Only the day before, Cockie's dark joke wouldn't have included me, but now it did. "Is love always such a mess, do you suppose?

Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other.

Ben isn't hard to manage, but Blix's wife, Karen, likes the title too much to part with it. He's made her a baroness." She sighed. "The whole thing has got rather baroque. Karen and I are friends, or were, in any case. Blix asked her for a divorce and told her he was in love with me, probably thinking it would soften the blow." She shook her head. "Now she won't speak to me.

He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy.

When I pulled up in D's wagon, I nearly always got a chaste kiss on the cheek. We'd have a drink on the veranda and discuss what had happened on the farm while I was away, the servants milling around us, always happy to see me home. But as soon as night fell and we were alone, the mood turned chilly fast. Jock never tried to touch me sexually—that