Quotes About Emotion

Grief doesn't have a face.

When we see a painting that we love, we're not standing there thinking about the artist who made it — we're thinking about how that painting makes us feel, what that reflects to us about our lives and the world. And so I love when love exceeds … its creator, which is the whole goal of art…; when it becomes not about the person who created it, but about the people who consume it…

She cried and her tears fell in the wrong direction. Not down over the light of her cheeks to the corners of her mouth, but away from the edges of her eyes to her ears and into the nest of her hair on the bed. She

Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.

We didn't exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two.

He hadn't loved

She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.

She'd come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn't held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.

We'd have long conversations during which I'd weep and tell him everything and he would cry with me and try to make it all just a tiny bit more okay, but his words rang hollow. It was almost as if I couldn't hear them at all. What did he know about losing anything?

But she would never get there, no matter how wide she stretched her arms. The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained.

I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal.

She'd been dead an hour. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an island of warm. I pressed my face into the warmth and howled some more.

As I passed them, I felt the presence of my mother so acutely that I had the sensation that she was there; once I even paused to look around for her before I could go on.

As I read, I could feel my mother's presence so acutely, her absence so profoundly, that it was hard to focus on the words.

One is the life you'll have; the other is the one you won't. Switch them around in your head and see how it feels. Which affects you on a visceral level? Which won't let you go? Which is ruled by fear? Which is ruled by desire? Which makes you want to close your eyes and jump and which makes you want to turn and run?

Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.

A proclamation of love is not inherently "loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.

He was once so struck by something I said to him in the course of an argument that he immediately wrote it on a scrap of paper and stuck it to our refrigerator, where it stayed for nearly a decade. The quote? I'm going to be mad at you for the rest of my life.

You are not grieving your son's death because his death was ugly and unfair. You're grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence

Each of Dermoût's sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.

The music felt like sustenance to me, like food

I want to see the contours of your second beating heart.

fountains of inconvenient feeling—and toward the frantic enticements of