Quotes About Emotion

Sympathy is charming, but it does not make up for pain.

Grief is a normal and natural response to loss. It is originally an unlearned feeling process. Keeping grief inside increases your pain.

I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.

I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.

There's little place for sympathy in football.

There is just something about a symphony that moves my soul.

Not everyone can write a book or paint a picture or write a symphony, but almost anyone can fall in love. There is something almost miraculous in that.

I grew up loving symphonies. Beethoven is beautiful.

When we're at the end of The Rite of Spring or of a Bruckner symphony, I want people to feel the music physically.

Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people.

A friend gave me a CD of the 'Pathetique' Symphony as a Christmas present. I went home, and I put on the CD expecting to listen to Tchaikovsky. But it started 'ta ta ta taaa.' It was too long for me. I didn't understand it at first, but then I fell in love, in love, in love.

I love symphonies. I love string sections.

When I was five, I heard the end of Beethoven's 'Ninth Symphony' with my mother, and I got goosebumps all over my body.

When you're in love, your heart and your mind are in sync, and everything just feels right. It's a special feeling.

I love power ballads and the earnest lack of irony and emotion that exists in '80s music, along with synth guitars, of course.

I think art, more than anything else, helps humans to synthesize emotion and to synthesize parts of ourselves, so therefore, as an artist, I feel a responsibility to try and facilitate that synthesis.

Contempt is the only asymmetrical expression in the muscular facial system: Disgust, fear, happiness, surprise and anger typically express themselves symmetrically. Contempt is marked by one lip corner pulled up and in a dismissive sneer.

Positioning ourselves, physically and psychologically, on the same plane with our subjects can help us avoid what Gardner refers to as "frigidity" in our writing, one of the "faults of soul" he warns against. Frigidity is coldhearted failure to respond on a deep, human level to the characters and events of our story. Sometimes,

What a truly remarkable emotion love is," he whispered, his breath fogging the window. Only love, the very thing he'd once believed to be pure myth, could have made him feel the way he had today at the race. He'd been irritated by the way people laughed at her, angered by the condescending way everyone looked and sneered at her. The whispered insults he'd heard had infuriated him, and Wesley's slander had finally hurled him into a rage.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.

I still think about the letter you asked me to write. It nags at me, even though you're gone and there's no one to give it to anymore. Sometimes I work on it in my head, trying to map out the story you asked me to tell, about everything that happened this past fall and winter. It's all still there, like a movie I can watch when I want to. Which is never.

Love is when you like someone so much that you can't just call it "like," so you have to call it "love.

And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love.

Some feeling had started in my stomach and was traveling up to my face, and I knew that when it got there I would turn bright red and hear the ocean, which is what happens when I get put on the spot. If I don't cry, I turn red and hear the ocean. It's a lose-lose situation.