Quotes About Emotions

She must shepherd them back over that ultrafine line between numbness and awe.

If only people, like some invertebrates, would just turn raging purple when they felt attraction. It would make the entire species so much less neurotic.

But he'd survived his mother's death. I figured he'd survive my best intentions.

It's what his muscles know, especially that largest muscle in his inventory—his soul.

We live suspended between love and ego.

If you ask a person, "What were you thinking?" you may get an answer that is richer and more revealing of the human condition than any stream of thoughts a novelist could invent.

In an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did.

In my experience, if you are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over.

Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don't know it.

In that moment, I was not sad about any one thing, but about everything. The tragedies I had witnessed in the previous months all piled up and overflowed into one big, clumped-together sadness and suffering that I couldn't escape. It is what my friend William Paul Young calls the "Great Sadness," a pain so huge and deep, it feels as though it will never end. And yet the sadness was focused not on one particular issue but on all of them at once.

Whenever we get defensive or go emotionally up and down, this is a sign that we are attached to a self-image.

Cesar Milan, the "dog whisperer," says that dogs cannot be peaceful or teachable if they have no limits set to their freedom and their emotions. They are actually happier and at rest when they live within very clear limits and boundaries, with a "calm and assertive" master. My dog, Venus, is never happier and more teachable than when I am walking her, but on her leash. Could it be the same for humans at certain stages?

but I do believe that the only way out of deep sadness is to go with it and through it.

the little boy couldn't feel and admit the pain until he was sufficiently sure that love was there.

So long as we all cling to our prejudices and identify with our preconceived views and feelings, genuine human community is impossible. You have to get to the point where you can break free from your feelings. Otherwise in the end you won't have any feelings; they'll have you.

I must be losing patience with my fellow humans, Miss Beryl went on. Anymore I'm all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I'll be voting Republican soon.

It was my opinion (then and now) that two people who love each other need not necessarily have the same dreams and aspirations, but they damn well ought to share the same nightmares.

His carefully calculated sincerity is almost entirely indistinguishable from the real thing.

It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.

That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about—acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind.

Over graduation weekend Jacy learned something about loneliness that she hadn't suspected before: that its most terrifying and virulent form could only be experienced in a crowd.

I don't dislike Gracie. At least I don't dislike her when I think about her. When I'm in one place and she's in another. It's when she's near enough to backhand that back-handing her always seems like a good idea. This is true of several of my colleagues, actually, though they don't bother me in the abstract.

Nor do I want the woman that I'm married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not.

He's got a good, righteous head of steam up, and I envy him this. He's saying things that friendship has kept him from saying for twenty years, and their release at this late date is orgasmic. Asking him to stop would be like asking him to pull out.