Quotes About Emotion

To love me, my family does not need to understand me.

Darling,' when Charlie said it, felt like a whirlpool of rapture. Whenever Greenie answered the phone, he would say just that word, and Greenie would say 'You,' which was her way of expressing that he was now the world to her, that he was the one for whom she was always waiting, that he was the high cliff on which she was happy to stand and from which she had come to realize she might, at any moment, jump. Jump with open eyes and outspread arms.

He pressed his lips against hers and closing his own eyes, ignoring the pain in his side, and the uncertainty in his chest he mouthed, 'I love my Princess. I love my Jocelyn. Love you and only you from now until forever.

She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.

Before she knew what she was about, she was jumping about like a crazy woman, yelling, "Yes! Yes! I win!" "You don't win," Anthony snapped. "Oh, it feels like I've won," she reveled.

One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

This is what those who haven't crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition.

Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.

Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.

The, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

The heart of my life; the life of my heart.

And if you had no tongue, no celebrating language, you'd do this: cross your hands at the wrist with palms facing towards you; place your crossed wrists over your heart (the middle of your chest, anyway); then move your hands outwards a short distance, and open them towards the object of your love. It's just as eloquent as speech.

But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Poets don't run out of material the way novelists do because they don't depend on material in the same way.

Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.

Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn't make it any the less real. And it was the only story.

In love, everything is both true and false; it's the one subject on which it's impossible to say anything absurd.

Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera).