Quotes About Emotions

There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it.

The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure…I'm lonely…I'm a failure…I'm lonely…) and we become monuments to them.

I have never loved the people I was supposed to love, Angela.

Sex is often a cheat - a shortcut of intimacy. A way to skip over knowing somebody's heart by knowing, instead, their mere body.

It should have been unbearable to face this sorry inventory, yet for some reason it was not.

Wayan laughed and kissed her daughter, all the sadness about the divorce suddenly gone from her face.

We loved each other. That was never the question. It's just that we couldn't figure out how to stop making each other desperately, shriekingly, soul-punishingly miserable.

there came a point in my life when I stopped doing this—when I stopped responding to life's challenges with floods of tears. Because really, there is no dignity in it. These days, I am the sort of tough-skinned old battle-ax who would rather stand dry-eyed and undefended in the most hostile underbrush of truth than degrade herself and everyone else by collapsing into a swamp of manipulative tears.

A sad-faced Russian woman tells us she's treating herself to Italian lessons because I think I deserve something beautiful.

We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear, he said. Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.

I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can't, and you hate yourself because you can't, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier because with God's help you can command your will when you can't command your feelings. With us, feelings seem to be important, but He doesn't appear to agree with us.

Don't waste hate on pink geranium.

Now it's dusk, bats swooping and rising along the lawn, against the sea. Would that she could join them-flap wings, fly blind, beat back her foul mood.

how much he loved being alone except when he didn't, except when it got to be too much?

Helen was happy for them, and disdainful, and jealous of them for getting more of each other while she got less of them, and, mostly, astonished-that life could actually move forward like this into adulthood.

I love him too and believe he loves me, but does he like me, which is not the same as love?

Finally he turned his head toward her face and brushed a kiss over her cheek. "I love you and I believe with all my heart that you love me as well. Why can't you say it, Hero?

Please remember that just because love isn't expressed doesn't mean it isn't felt.

Each time it was like a stray bit of glass pressed into the softness of her heart, grinding, grinding, oh so silently until she no longer noticed when she bled.

Why me? Because you draw me. Because you are kind but not soft. Because when you touch me, the pain is bittersweet. Because you cradle a desperate secret to your bosom, like a viper in your arms, and don't let go of it even as it gnaws upon your very flesh. I want to pry that viper from your arms. To suckle upon your torn and bloody flesh. To take your pain within myself and make it mine.

He lowered his head and beat, fists balled, teeth clenched, the roaring in his ears loud and total. He saw only Thomas's bloody face, his brother's mouth moving, saying something, perhaps pleading, and Griffin's heart swelled with gleeful rage. He'd touched her. He'd hurt her. And for that he deserved to walk upon crippled legs.

She took his length gently between her hands, her arms resting on his thighs, and looked up into his face. "I'm very, very angry with you." And she opened her mouth over him.

It took a moment to recognize Timothy... her first love. There had been a time when the mere sight of his handsome face had made her catch her breath. It had taken her years to recover from losing Timothy. Now the pain of his loss was muted and somehow apart from her, as if a broken engagement had happened to some other young, naive girl. She looked at him, and all she could think was, Thank Goodness. Thank goodness she's escaped marrying him.

I won't marry you," she repeated. "Why not? You were eager enough to fuck me." Anna winced. "I do wish you would stop using that word." Edward swung around and assumed a hideously sarcastic expression. "Would you prefer swive? Tup? Dance the buttock jig?