Quotes About Emotion

I'm tired of Love: I'm still more tired of Rhyme.But Money gives me pleasure all the time.

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. —William Butler Yeats

Men say," Liz reaches for her scissors, "'I can't endure it when women cry'--just as people say, 'I can't endure this wet weather.' As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the crying. Just one of those things that happen.

There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word.

T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.

Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out.

You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

Children's] lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts in our lives...The unborn, whether they're named or not, whether or not they're acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt.

Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled. (Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)

he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme...

He saw how, as she received the bundle, the woman shuddered from the nape of her neck to her feet. She held it fast though, and a head is heavier than you expect. Having been on a battlefield, he knows this from experience too.

My mother did not need much food - she ran on wrath (pp94)

She held out her hands in a curve around herself, to show how emotion distends you. It makes you feel full up, a big weight in your chest, and then you don't want your dinner.

Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?

A shock will do it, he said, or strong emotion, strong emotion of any sort. It can be horror. Or disgust. But, then again, it doesn't have to be. Sometimes, he said, people die laughing.

If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret; never let people see you.

It would have been quite in order to slap his face, but what a cliché, she thought, and besides she was off balance. She had always wanted to do it to someone, but would have preferred someone more robust; so, between one thing and another, the moment passed.

And yet … he feels something, in his heart, and then he sits down and works out the logic of it, in his head. Then he says that the head part came first; and we believe him.

She had built a little house for love, and it was flattened by one remark. Now she lives in the wreckage

There are moments when a memory moves right through you. You shy, you duck, you run; or else the past takes your fist and actuates it, without the intervention of will. Suppose you have a knife in your fist? That's how murder happens.

He feels someone has attached a weight to his heart. Not a big weight: just a small leaden bob, so he feels the drag.

He will never claim, later, that his heart did not turn over. He is not one to boast of a coolness no reasonable man would possess.

Michael allowed himself to look at Caddy for the first time since she had climbed into the car. It was a moment that he always put off for as long as possible because his concentration was never quite the same afterwards.

I took 'P.S. I Love You' thinking it was going to be a little funny, and I ended up crying every day on that film.