Quotes About Emotions

So much of motherhood is acting.

Sometimes love is a pie. There just isn't enough to go around. Or OK, maybe there is enough love, but not enough time and attention, so you have to grab your piece, and then the pie smashes and you're fighting for crumbs...

pain is like water, it spreads out as soon as she lies down.

One couldn't pick whom to love, thought Anne, The woman beside her was friend and sister and lover and many things besides. One could only hope to recognise love where it grew, and get a grip on it and hold on.

I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened

How could anyone bear to be a parent? Like contracting to love a werewolf.

Mary regretted it a little already. Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.

she feels that surge of warmth, and this time she remembers what it means: not love but piss. Or the love that's mixed with piss and can't be separated from it.

Bridie and I turned to each other. Oh, the secrecy and heat of that glance.

You can have this kind of love. You can have it. You just grab it. Of course the problem with having that love is that you can lose it, too.

What people don't understand when you've already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don't want to die. I do not want to die. When you don't have so much control over your own thoughts, over the myriad voices in your head, you don't know where they could go.

I still believe that you truly find yourself not in travel, but in other human souls.

People don't know. We don't know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people. We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who've left us is because we knew them so well.

My thoughts are messy, my emotions are messy, my body goes in and out at will. The raised white scars on my arms and legs are the only aspect of my being that comes close to minimalism. They came from chaos, but it is hard to carve frustration and unease into the flesh. Only straight lines.

I finally accept that not only do I not understand the death of my relationship, but I do not need to. These men were good and kind to me, they loved me and I loved them back and the shock at the finish holds no wisdom. The revelation is not that I lost them, but that I had them.

The sadness ? the general sadness that squats and pees inside my brain ? isn't over. It never will be. I know how best to chase it away, though. It usually works. Sometimes it doesn't. But I pray and say, fuck it, then. I choose this. It chooses me. I choose it back.

When he asked if he was mine, tears in his eyes, I think he knew what he would do, what he would have to do, and he was mourning us. He was mourning us the whole time.

He meant everything he said, when he said it. But this is his default. And it won out. Right now you're depressed about one thing. Before you were depressed about everything. These are good times for you. I'm afraid of loving again. I'm afraid I've lost my faith. You haven't. The trapdoor I have in my mind? That can go to those bad places? It's almost gave way again. You know the ways to keep it nailed shut.

There is something deeply unsettling about a child crying insincerely.

You may right now be nursing a broken heart. Friends will say, Aren't you glad you had the experience anyway? And you may say No. Eventually, unbelievably, you may not remember the boy that triggered it all. You'll recall all the places you visited, but not how you got there. You'll remember the songs that you listened to.

My moods are the equivalent of Madonna's dancing: inappropriate but all-out

The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.

All unnatural unions which are not hallowed by love are prostitution.

Puritanism in this the twentieth century is as much the enemy of freedom and beauty as it was when it landed on Plymouth Rock. It repudiates, as something vile and sinful, our deepest feelings; but being absolutely ignorant as to the real functions of human emotions, Puritanism is itself the creator of the most unspeakable vices.