Quotes about Emotional Resonance

I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me.

The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.

whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:

As music is present yet you can't touch it.

Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child's voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress.

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations.

The words seemed to come from a place deep inside me, far beyond the place where I stored them, past the ideas.

She had caught the sound of suffering in the faintest exaggeration of evenness in his voice.

He said it without greeting, as if they had parted the day before. Because it took her a moment to regain the art of breathing, she realized for the first time how much that voice meant to her.

Leggevamo a turno, a voce alta, e le parole sembravano salire in alto per poi ricadere su di noi come rugiada.

people were moved by emotion, not facts.

mono no aware, the sadness of being human

Music reveals a personal past of which, until then, each of us was unaware, moving us to lament misfortunes we never suffered and wrongs we did not commit. —Jorge Luis Borges

But the truth is, when it comes to emotional pain—the pain that registers inside—the greatest damage is often the thing that continues to resonate when the feeling of the pain subsides. It is that message that the pain tells us about ourselves and about the meaning of our lives.

If what you're saying is bouncing off their psychological armor, it makes little difference how good you are at saying it. You are not being heard. Your people have to hear you to be moved by you.

Your argument may be factually indisputable and logically airtight but if it doesn't resonate for the recipient, you won't get anywhere.

I think that with any emotion - fear, love, nervousness - if the actor's feeling it, then the audience feels it.

Even when people can't speak your language, they can tell if you have love in your heart.

Water has memory. Depending on how you treat it, what kind of thoughts and emotions you generate, accordingly it behaves in your body.

Good impro can make you laugh, we love it, but soon the content is forgotten. Good scenes from The Life Game stay with you always. They haunt you.

You know, when it works, love is pretty amazing. It's not overrated. There's a reason for all those songs.

The first music you really fall in love with is more than just music. It's something that clicks in you beyond the song; it's a message or image that causes you to jump in and not let go.

Knowledge and achievements matter little if we do not yet know how to touch the heart of another and be touched.

Books and music saved me as a teenager because it was through them that I realized that I wasn't alone in my obsessive love for words and music.