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Quotes About Emotion

How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again that tear you apart.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Because I am in love. Love is a slow bleed.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
What is technique but the absence of passion?
~ Joyce Carol Oates
The fundamental truth of my life whether in fact it was truth or a burlesque of truth: when a man wants you, you're safe.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
There are people, primarily women!--who are what I call 'conduits of emotion.' In their company, the half dead can come alive. They need not be beautiful women or girls. It's a matter of blood warmth. The integrity of the spirit. He turned the page of his sketch pad and began anew, whistling thinly through his teeth. Thus an icy-cold soul, in the presence of one so blessed, can regain something of his lost self. Sometimes!
~ Joyce Carol Oates
On the way home Mary Lou said, Some things are so sad you can't say them. But I pretended not to hear.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
It is required that we must be fiercely beloved by one individual in order to exist: for Sabbath, Haley was that individual.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Laughter too depends upon memory—a memory of previous laughter. Dr.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
The things that link us deepest, we can't feel. Except if they're taken from us.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
SO RISKY, to love another person! Like flaying your own, outermost skin. Exposed to the crude air and every kind of infection.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first time in her life that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn't really hers either.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Asked by a journalist how he had felt after an unsuccessful election, Abraham Lincoln said, Like a little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark, he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Love is what can't be helped. When it waxes, and when it wanes. Love is what happens when you've been looking another way. Love is that sensation of something on the back of your neck, tell yourself it's nothing, a strand of hair, at last you touch it and discover it's an insect—you cast off with a curse.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
What've I got to do, to prove how much I love you? Blow us all away?
~ Joyce Carol Oates
I could talk fast -- that's to say, without hesitating, stammering -- most of the time -- but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, they'd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance 'Yeah you're my heart too!' or 'I love you' or 'I would die for you', nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me and we hardly talked at all.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
The aim of theater—Aristotle said it first, and Aristotle said it best—is to arouse profound emotion in the spectator and through this arousal to effect a catharsis of the soul. If there's
~ Joyce Carol Oates