Quotes about Emotion

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. He has no talent for monotony.

The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love; there's no other kind of love in this room now.

Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.

But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.

He's coming to hate the gratitude of women. It is like being fawned on by rabbits, or like being covered with syrup: you can't get it off.

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary —the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch

My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red. —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Maud, 1855.

It would make me feel that I have power. But such a feeling would be an illusion, and too risky.

Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.

The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold onto.

The bathrobe was magenta, a colour that still makes him anxious whenever he sees it.