Quotes About Emotions

I thought I knew what love was, but I have never felt like this before" is a common refrain. People in this state talk to me about love, transcendence, awakening, destiny, divine intervention—something so pure that they could not pass it by, because "to deny those feelings would have been an act of self-betrayal.

An infant, in his first sleepiness, must let go of the world; a man must learn to die. What comes between are the grains of sand. Ambition. Loss. Envy. Desire. Hatred. Love. Tenderness. Joy. Shame. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Ache. Surrender.

Does one grow wise in increments? By fractioning a life and then summing it? By stacking sand? An infant, in his first sleepiness, must let go of the world; a man must learn to die. What comes between are the grains of sand. Ambition. Loss. Envy. Desire. Hatred. Love. Tenderness. Joy. Shame. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Ache. Surrender. Live long enough and you will solve them all.

Happy isn't even a real idea, he said. It's just like love. A reasonably skeptical person doesn't even know what it means.

the actual joy of acting lies in the absence of personality.

Jealousy, fear, and anger are all obstacles to a knight's first goal: a clear mind

That's the point of acting: to bring about awareness of humanity, to conjure compassion, and to alleviate shame.

Watching love die: that's an ornery armor-piercing bullet. When taking the kids to school, the laundry, and the dishes rain down on the last remaining coals of your romance like piss on a morning campfire. When all you're left with is enough smoke to choke on. Then your heart is dead.

I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, but I love you," I repeated. I wanted her to accept my apology and then we could kiss and get married. "You love me now?" she asked, straight-faced, turning so she was flat toward me, her hands tucked into the armpits of her sweatshirt. "I love you now." I tried to be clear, unafraid, unconflicted. "Tomorrow?" "I want to marry you," I said. There was a giant pause. We looked at each other.

Non c'è niente di male nell'essere arrabbiato: nessuno te lo proibisce. Ma ti ci vuole una quantità tremenda di energia per continuare a fare finta di non esserlo.

Like Oscar Hammerstein, LaChiusa knows that characters express themselves in their own wording as well as their own music.

Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lies a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature itself. Westerners share, for instance, beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We are certain that humans are innately fragile and should consider many emotional experiences as illnesses that require professional intervention.

I know and share the many sorrows a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them; they pass through me, like life itself, as a broad eternal stream...and life continues...

What matters is not to allow my whole life to be dominated by what is going on inside me. That has to be kept subordinate one way or another. What I mean is: one must not let oneself be completely disabled by just one thing, however bad; don't let it impede the great stream of life that flows through you. I have the feeling of something secret deep inside me that no one knows about.

For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.

For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.

At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

When my mother would tell me that she wanted me to have something because she as a child had never had it, I wanted, or I partly wanted, to give it back. All my life I continued to feel that bliss for me would have to imply my mother's deprivation or sacrifice. I don't think it would have occurred to her what a double emotion I felt, and indeed I know that it was being unfair to her, for what she said was simply the truth.

If reality is what looms, love is what pervades...

Her father left his questions unasked. But both knew, and for the same reason, that bad days go better without any questions at all.

I knew this, anyway: that my wish, indeed my continuing passion, would be not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

She (my mother) could still recite them (the poems) in full when she was lying helpless and nearly blind, in her bed, an old lady. Reciting, her voice took on resonance and firmness, it rang with the old fervor, with ferocity even. She was teaching me one more, almost her last, lesson: emotions do not grow old. I knew that I would feel as she did, and I do.