Quotes About Emotions

When she walked away I felt the weight of what she left unsaid. I wanted to call after her, Ma! You have it all wrong. But just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you. I

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed—she had reached that point.

When she walked away I felt the weight of what she left unsaid. I wanted to call after her, Ma! You have it all wrong. But just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you.

just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you. I

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She

Mary and Jeb were an item from the time they were both in knickers. Even gave her a ring. Then this month my brother ditches her just like that. I'm still mad.

She listens. She knows he has heard her. Because, as was always his way, he expresses his love for her the only way he knows how: through his silence.

His mother's soul has been dead for years and her body has now followed.

Secrecy lives in the same rooms as loneliness. His secret and his failing is that after his mother's betrayal he cannot risk love.

The days that follow feel awkward. But silence still feels better than confessing. Besides, how does one rationally explain irrational fears? He

it is a reminder that the sweetness of life comes with bitterness.

In my garden there is a large place for sentiment. My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams. The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful.

If we could light up the room with pain, we'd be such a glorious fire.

I know you don't always understand, but let me point to the first wet drops landing on the stones, the noise like fingers drumming the skin. I can't help it. I will never get over making everything such a big deal.

What if, instead of carrying a child, I am supposed to carry grief?

I swear, I'll try harder not to miss as much: the tree, or how your fingers under still sleep-stunned sheets coaxed all my colors back.

Isn't it funny? How the cold numbs everything but grief. If we could light up the room with pain, we'd be such a glorious fire.

Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.

It turns out poetry does, in fact, do the thing I want it to do… it helps me return to the world, to experience it, to pay attention.

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper from a long line of weepers. I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

People love to make big pronouncements about poetry saving us. And I want to believe that, but for now, what I can say is … poetry can make us feel. And right now, maybe that's enough. It doesn't have to bring us hope or joy, it just has to remind us that we feel. That we are alive, and here, and feeling the world.

The problem with loneliness is that, unlike other forms of human suffering, it teaches us nothing, leads us nowhere, and generally devalues us in our own eyes and the eyes of others.

Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face.

The digging continues ... Ground Zero it looks more and more like a construction site. Too much of the horror is gone. No fire. No smoke ... What was war becomes peace, becomes peaceful. But in the coil of my testicles there's an angry residue and in places I can't even name, places inside my throat and behind my chest, I'm sad, and sometimes worse than sad, less than sad, a cavity of empty.