Quotes About Emotional

Betsy liked to read her stories aloud and she read them like an actress. She made her voice low and thrillingly deep. She made it shake with emotion. She laughed mockingly and sobbed wildly when the occasion required.

Guilt isn't always a rational thing, Clio realized. Guilt is a weight that will crush you whether you deserve it or not.

She often found that when everything felt a little too much, she could not talk to anyone, even if she actually wanted to. She had a tendency to go where other people were not, to step into shadows when people walked toward her. She had a fondness for headphones and screens and ducking away, even as part of her wanted to be with friends. Which meant she was going to the library to find some people who were probably dead.

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

El placer, para el ser humano, no es un lujo sino una necesidad psicológica profunda.

She nodded silently, unable to name as joy any part of the things she felt.

they seemed wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost . . . almost as if they were wounded by the mere fact of his being.

Well, it's like this: if you're forced into having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank—you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That's what we do here. We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else—we either plan it or dream it.

In return, I gave him a sounding board for his frustrations.

Listen to understand rather than listen to respond.

Just talk. Yet what concerned me wasn't the damage loose talk caused efforts...,or the emotional pain it caused others. It was the distance between our talk and our action, the effect it was having on us as individuals and as a people.

But she wasn't prepared for the loneliness. It was constant, like a shortness of breath

there's good crazy and bad crazy

The doctor's detachment is not a defense against excessive empathy, but a "downright negative" emotional stance

Sage's parents might just as well have been in a plane crash. They had fallen out of her life, and Sage had been horribly hurt. The kind of hurt that could turn you mean, when what you really were was scared. Scared and lonely. She guessed Owen had been trying to tell her that about Sage. But she hadn't wanted to listen-couldn't listen. Then. (pg. 117)

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

If you're surprised a mom would discuss boyfriend hotness with a kid still learning not to pick his nose, you've not seen the far end of lonely.

She cursed aloud and sat up. Damned thing, self-consciousness, like a pitiful stray dog tagging you down the road—so hard to shake off. So easy to get back. No man had ever spoken to her

I hollered back.

She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time. How much of it was her fault? That question haunted her.

Coming back to where you grew up is like doing some crazy yoga trick, putting your feet in your own mouth and somehow swallowing yourself so there's nothing left; it can't be done, and any sane person ought to be fucking glad it can't . . .

Reactive people are also affected by their social environment, by the "social weather." When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don't, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.

Empathy is not sympathy. A sympathy is a form of agreement. Empathy is not agreeing with someone; it is fully, deeply understanding that person, emotionally as well as intellectually.

I remember both of us becoming tearful on that day, not so much because of the insights, but because of the increased sense of reverence we had for each other. We discovered that even seemingly trivial things often have roots in deep emotional experiences. To deal only with the superficial trivia without seeing the deeper, more tender issues is to trample on the sacred ground of another's heart.