Quotes About Emotions

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

Good sex isn't just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent

Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.

Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

We are not always humiliated by failing at things; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement, and then do not reach it.

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance.

Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships – if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love. Esther's

As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.

But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about from the full irresponsibility and scary strangeness of our urges.

To have a sexual history did not only imply one had made love to a succession of people, it also suggested one had either rejected or been rejected by these same bedroom companions.

The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own.