Quotes About Emotion

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?

For weeks, I'd been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I'd been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.

How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother? I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.

The smells, the shadows, even the dappled pale trunks of the plane trees lifted my spirits

It's a big shift. I don't know quite how to explain it. Between wanting and not wanting, caring and not caring. Of course it's a lot more than that too. Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighter and I feel on the edge of something inexpressible.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own.

My heart - which, thrilled at my daring, had held its breath for a moment or two - began suddenly to beat quite wildly

ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.

While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.

I don't want you to help me.' She raised her head and looked at me: her gaze hit me hard and sweet as a shot of morphine.

La belleza es terror. Temblamos ante todo lo que llamamos bello.

And—maybe it's ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn't matter since no one's ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest

The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it.

I knew it deeply and irrationally like knowledge in a dream.

Psychology is a terrible a word.

He's so particilar, Rembrandt. Even his religious subjects — it's as if the saints came down to model for him in the life… You could pick him out of a line-up, couldn't you…? Goodness written all over him and yet always that twitch of worry and disquiet. That subtle shade of the betrayer

I am nothing in my soul if not possessive

Because I love Henry. Henry's dead. I can't help it. I still love him.

and though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did.

Una cosa era ver un cuadro en un museo, pero contemplarlo bajo todas esas luces, estados anímicos y estaciones diferentes era apreciarlo de mil formas distintas; guardarlo encerrado en la oscuridad —un objeto hecho de luz, que solo vivía en la luz— no estaba bien por muchas razones que no sabría explicar.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.

Yet every time I remembered it I was suffused with a glow of warmth.

the place where words didn't work.

and my love for her was really just that pure, as simple and steady as the moon.