Quotes About Emotion

I love badly. That is too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out the window.

When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.

your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm you play upon me, drumming me taught.

Love is an intervention. Why do we not choose it?" (205)

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say 'I think' we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise than how should I call it love?

Words like passion and ecstasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try to turn them over, find out what's on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell os a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much.

I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I.

I was angry. Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about.

If everything I have become were not machine-made I might be able to take the risk of being human with you.

He scarred her arm...but she did not care because she loved him and she knew that love leaves a wound that leaves a scar.

Language is what stops the heart exploding.

He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset that there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won't hit love in the face.

She looked at me. There was a second the kind that holds the whole world ...

A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.

The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. ... Wisdom says forget, the body howls.

What is there to say about love ? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn't be any different, wouldn't feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can't tame we talk about.

We were not lovers, we were love.

Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish.

Wrong to seal illogic with a kiss but I do it myself all the time.

My dear, you are in danger of being burned by your own flame.

I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself.

I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don't want to be swimming for my life.

My mother's eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky.