Quotes About Emotion

Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity or terror, which is not abstract at all but very human.

There is no way to stop. Writers go on writing long after it becomes financially unnecessary...because it hurts less to write than it does not to write.

What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce—render emotional-his audience, each time.

hurry" was not a concept that could be symbolized in the Martian language and therefore must be presumed to be unthinkable. Speed, velocity, simultaneity, acceleration, and other mathematical abstractions having to do with the pattern of eternity were part of Martian mathematics, but not of Martian emotion.

Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy—in fact, they're almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other. Both at once can produce unbearable turmoil—and

Man is the animal who laughs

The only constant thing in these shifting, fairy-chess worlds is human love.

Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience.

I grok people now, Jill . . . Little Brother . . . precious darling . . . little imp with lively legs and lovely lewd lascivious lecherous licentious libido . . . beautiful bumps and pert posterior . . . soft voice and gentle hands. My baby darling." "Why

Oh, my God!" "Compose yourself.

while our Empress was cold on the outside, she was at the same time wildly passionate on the inside, and in this way very, very Russian.

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.

Similarly, the Russians discovered, in the 1920s, that an actor ordered to show no emotion as he looks out a window will seem to show any emotion the director wishes, if in the editing we, the audience, see something outside the window. Do we see a dying child? The expressionless actor seems to project grief so deep it cannot find expression yet. A dog playing? The same actor with the same non-expression seems to project quiet amusement . . .

Since words contain both denotations (referents in the sensory-existential world) and connotations (emotional tones and poetic or rhetorical hooks), humans can be moved to action even by words which have no real meaning or reference in actuality. This is the mechanism of demagoguery, advertising and much of organized religion.

The second circuit, the emotional-territorial networks of the brain, is concerned entirely with power politics. This "patriotic" circuit is built into all vertebrates and is perhaps 500 million to 1000 million years old. In the modern human it seems to be centralized in the thalamus — the "back brain" or "old brain" and is linked with the voluntary nervous system and the muscles.

In pre-ethological terms, the emotional-territorial circuit is what we usually call "ego." Ego is simply the mammalian recognition of one's status in the pack; it is a "role" as sociologists say, a single brain circuit which mistakes itself for the whole Self, the entire brain-mind apparatus. The "egotist" behaves like "a two year old," in the common saying, because Ego is the imprint of the toddling and toilet-training stage.

The second, emotional-territorial circuit, creates a two-dimensional social space in conjunction with first-circuit advance-retreat.

Where feeling is reaction, emotion is adaptation. So feeling is an instantaneous, nonreflective (there's no time for reflection!) arising, but emotion is all about how we handle that feeling.

Emotion is far more verb than noun, being not some entity or thing we can get out of our system but a vital process always in some degree of flux.

I NEVER SAW Susan without feeling a small but discernible thrill. The thrill was mixed with a feeling of gratitude that she was with me, and a feeling of pride that she was with me, and a feeling of arrogance that she was fortunate to be with me. But mostly it was just a quick pulse along the ganglia which, if it were audible, would sound a little like woof.

There is excitement in a new kiss, but there is a quality of memory and intimacy in kissing someone you've kissed often before. I

She laughed in the darkness. "Of course it is," she said. "That's the story of your life. What doesn't matter. It's how you look when you do it.

There were worse things than being in love with two women. Better than being in love with none.

I kissed her. There is excitement in a new kiss, but there is a quality of memory and intimacy in kissing someone you've kissed often before. I liked the quality. Maybe continuity is better than change.