Quotes About Emotion

Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after

For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame.

She didn't like weepy films. She liked to quote D. H. Lawrence : Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got. Hers were grim European films — Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bergman — films where everybody died or wished they had.

I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I'd cried all I could and it wasn't enough.

I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.

but for poetry one needs one's native tongue. The voice of the soul is not so easily translated.

My mother was not herself in the time of the Santa Anas. I was twelve years old and I was afraid for her.

But things coming out of her, visible to the world? It was in a strange way another loss. You gave things away you couldn't afford to lose. Private things. You showed yourself and you couldn't take it back.

The smell of the smoke always brought me back to my mother, to a rooftop under an untrustworthy moon. How beautiful she had been, how perfectly unhinged.

Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness.

I wanted to put words between us, like spikes, to keep myself from falling into him like a girl without bones.

Knew what it was to loose him. That specific being. that unique and miraculous collision of biology and history, spirit and matter.

So now I was supposed to feel pity for you and those other women who'd lost their own children during a holdup, a murder, a fiesta of greed? Save your poet's sympathy and find some better believer. Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good.

Those who love poetry, even my unreadable foreign brand, are a tender breed.

Father turned on me as if blackbirds had flown out of my mouth.

My freckles felt like they would burst into flame.

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific—chair, eye, stone—but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

So often when I was with her, she was unreachable. Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

I was bad, I had done bad things, I had hurt people, and the worst of it was, I didn't want to stop. Blue

People just wanted to be loved. That

I don't want things. I just want to feel like someone gives a shit.

When I'd been with Kolya, I'd been the moon, and he was the sun: he could give me his warmth or withhold it, pursue me or forget me.

Are you gay?' Paul Trout asked me. I shrugged. Maybe that would be better. I thought back to how I felt when Olivia danced with me, and the time Claire kissed me on the lips. I didn't know. People just wanted to be loved. That was the things about words, they were clear and specific -- chair, eye, stone -- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings.

So much for those gleanings from novels, from paintings, as if love were a matter of posing in picturesque dishabille. No. You went into it as a tiger encountering another tiger. You went into it like a person jumping off a bridge.