Quotes About Emotions

We need novels in order to enter the minds of others. But that project can run up against the opacities of other minds and spirits. When a man tells us of a woman's desiring, we should beware of blindness.

We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one. The memories we organize meaningfully become those that are better remembered. Narrative provides not only meaning but also a mental framework for imbuing future experiences and information with meaning, in effect shaping new memories to fit our established constructs of the world and ourselves.

We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one.

Are you okay?' she asked me. Of course,' I said. 'Why wouldn't I be okay?' There are lots of reasons why you might not be okay.' There are lots of reasons why anyone might not be okay,' I said.

I don't know why I felt so closed and bitter and threatened by the things I did not like.

Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say "I love you." I think just the opposite—that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them.

I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought.

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness.

Every single person you meet, Philo wrote, it's said—Everyone— is fighting a very great battle. Except that no one is able to find where he said it, or what he thought the burden might be that brings it on. Still, it's almost certainly true— and so he added, perhaps, be kind.

We have, all of us, less control over our emotional states than we imagine, and not much more over our moral sensibilities.

We undervalue irrationality, I believe. It can protect us in hostile settings.

The contrast between a patient depressed and a patient recovered is the contrast between absence and presence.

Women never understand. We fall in love with their defects, not their perfection.

Your reading of these words is very beautiful and, somehow, very sad, because we both know it must end.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other. It may be the very recognition of all men as our brothers that accounts for the sibling rivalry, and even enmity, we have toward so many of them.

I once tried drowning my sorrows, till I found out they could swim.

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.

It's not the pain that hurts,' she said, 'it's finding out that one of your idols is a real asshole.

Bollocks! Bollocks, bollocks.

Memories do not hurt, they only influence.

If I can get all hot under the collar about the purity of a hat, just think what I'm like when human heritage is threatened with extinction.