Quotes about Emotional Resonance

I sense you in the secret of all the paintings I love. I hear you stumbling at the stony core of the only books I read, the few I know how to read.

Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.

As readers, we want not only a strong story, but also characters we can relate to, characters that feel real. We have to find something of ourselves in them. Each character, even those only there to serve the mechanics of the plot, should have a number of layers. The entire world you are stepping into as a reader must feel real. It must have resonance, you must be able to touch the light; smell the smells.

She was talking to a something deep in me that never got talked to, that hardly even had words.

The novel tends to tell us everything,' wrote V.S. Pritchett in his introduction to the Oxford Book of Short Stories, 'whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely'.

I love Black Beauty, but it's just a story, of course. What matters is. . . I don't know. . . what you do once the story is inside you.

Everything we say to each other echoes with meanings left over from our past experience— both our history talking to the person before us at this moment and our history talking to others. This is especially true in the family— and our history of family talk is like a prism through which all other conversations (and relationships) are refracted.

I love you, in my mind where my thoughts reside, in my heart where my emotions live, and in my soul where my dreams are born. I love you.

There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.

Hugh Kenner, in a lecture, beautifully defined what poets seek if they really are poets) as "the power to make things as moving as the things they have been moved by.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

The difference between seeing someone fall apart laughing and seeing them fall apart laughing at something you said. The first usually makes you feel as good and laugh as hard as they do, which raises your frequency. The second situation, you're not just meeting them at a high frequency, you're exchanging energy at a high frequency.

The King walks. He nods. His glance is like God's touch - under it all things spring to life. A wave of his hand and a hundred musicians tear into the Handel, making a sound you've never heard before, and never will again. A sound that goes through you, through flesh and bone, and reorders the very beat of your heart.

You will never know how much I understand you.

It's not the bad memories that tear a person apart. It's the good ones.

But when he smiled, I still felt seven years old and about three inches tall.

If a song's meant to stay around, you carry it with you in your bones.

His frame shivering, not as one shivers with chill or weakness, but as a tight-stretched cord vibrates- a strong thrilling, rather than trembling.

Heathcliff is more myself than I am.

Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room.

Mary regretted it a little already. Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.

The food doesn't matter, really. What it evokes does.

You give my heart hiccups.

Because the songs that don't make the listener feel like barbed wire is ripping through their chest make them feel like someone's stitching up the wound with a rusty needle and a bottle of scotch for the pain. It's not always happy, but God, those songs make you feel.