Quotes About Emotions

The agreeable passions of love and joy can satisfy and support the heart without any auxiliary pleasure. The bitter and painful emotions of grief and resentment more strongly require the healing consolation of sympathy.

The problem with breaking up with someone, if you are a little unsure — and so often, people are unsure — is that breaking up involves persuasion. You have to persuade your ex that it is better this way for everyone. And this is difficult if you have not entirely persuaded yourself. It is especially tricky to do this if you are also naked, and making two cups of coffee.

The attitude behind your words is as important as the words themselves.

Children don't need to have their feelings agreed with; they need to have them acknowledged.

Parents don't usually give this kind of response, because they fear that by giving a name to the feeling they'll make it worse. Just the opposite is true. The child who hears the words for what she is experiencing is deeply comforted. Someone has acknowledged her inner experience.

INSTEAD OF DISMISSING NEGATIVE FEELINGS ABOUT A SIBLING, ACKNOWLEDGE THE FEELINGS.

It's also not helpful when parents respond with more intensity than the child feels.

To be loved equally," I continued, "is somehow to be loved less. To be loved uniquely—for one's own special self—is to be loved as much as we need to be loved.

The passion and excitement you feel about a child's achievement should be saved for a moment when just the two of you are together. It's too much for the other siblings to have to listen to.

The more you try to push a child's unhappy feelings away, the more he becomes stuck in them. The more comfortable you can accept the bad feelings, the easier it is for kids to leg go of them.

She was her mother's favorite saying come to life. The cure for everything is salt water: tears, sweat, or the sea.

more guilt, guilt, guilt. That's the Irish condition.

Rachel shivers with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. How can she think about this sort of thing so glibly? Is that what trauma does to you?

The cure for everything is salt water: tears, sweat, or the sea.

She was her mother's favorite saying come to life. The cure for everything is salt water: tears, sweat, or the sea.

He puts on Sam Cooke's Night Beat.

I wished I could show Sunny the inside of my mind. To peel back the flesh and bone and white matter and show only the raw truth of me.

I knew why. I knew I loved you from the moment you barreled out of your house and demanded to help us move in. From the first time you held my hand and led me down to our fort by the cul-de-sac." She sighed. "I loved you every minute of it. And every single time we got close enough that I thought you might love me too, you pulled away.

I love you. The thought startled me, but I felt it spread through my body like warm ocean waves. I loved her. I wanted to say it, but I was afraid of being too much. Of scaring her off. Of adding to the jumble of overwhelming emotions she was probably already feeling. So, I tucked the words deep in the corner of my heart, saving them for a rainy day

The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.

Women are emotional creatures. You have to listen to them to figure out what they are saying. Show your wife steadfast loyalty.

Maybe a first love exists to reaffirm the best parts of yourself, the choices you made when you didn't worry about the consequences. Maybe a first love exists to remind you to be brave in the moment, to stand up for your feelings, instead of shrinking back in the face of potential loneliness.

I learned that I wasn't happy. It's a terrifying thing to admit. It puts everyone around you in a state of paralysis because they think that they are somehow responsible for your sadness and can fix it. Of course they cannot. I know happiness exists somewhere and if I knew where, I would go to it and claim it. I realize I have spent my life reacting to things and not initiating them.

There is no greater purpose for art than to move you, to elevate your mood, to make you think, to remind you of places you have been or places you want to build. It does everything—nourishes the soul and lifts the spirits of the people.