Quotes about Emotions

I loved the different voices all singing one song, the various tones and qualities, the passing lifts of feeling, rising up and going out forever. Old Man Profet, who was a different man on Sunday, used to draw out the notes at the ends of verses so he could listen to himself, and in fact it sounded pretty.

While her emotions were very real and they gnawed at her with a raw sincerity, she was listening to something deeper. She was listening to her will, not letting what she felt dictate what she would do. Didn't let it dictate her life.

I'm no expert, but I know one thing about anger—it's like alcohol. At some point, if you pour enough in there, it's coming back up. You may think you've built up a tolerance, but the truth is this—no man, not even Unc, can bury it so deep that it doesn't erupt at some point like Vesuvius and splatter your soul across the earth.

Some are wrestling with painful words spoken over them by someone they love or walking around in chains of their own making.

You and I... we never really finished our conversation, but I can tell you this... living with a broken heart is living half dead, and that doesn't mean you're half alive. It means you're half dead. And... that's no way to live.

Hatred and anger does not kill hatred and anger.

Sometimes I think that hell is two places: it's a place you end up, but it's also a place that you live before you get there. I don't know if the devil's got horns and a spear for a tail, but I don't think that's the point. The point is that hell is separate from love. If Lucifer knows anything, he knows that. And ever since Emma left, I'd known the same thing. It's a lonely, desolate place.

So, the water that would cleanse me was not water from my head—where I'd learned to rationalize my indifference. But water from my heart.

In my experience, it's those words on the tip of the tongue that we most need to hear. They are the key. The thing that's missing. But you can't pull them out. They have to be offered. Freely. And they won't be offered until the owner trusts you with them. And to do that means they've got to break through a world of hurt and pain just to get them out of their mouth. I caught my reflection in the mirror.

That was the night I learned the value of an old hymn. How something so old and "out-of-date" could say words my heart needed to hear and didn't know how to say.

I do know this: most people, myself included, are at their most vulnerable in a journal. They pour it all out. Sometimes a journal is the only ear that will listen, or at least the only one that you want to talk to.

Above all else, guard your heart . . . And on the back . . . for it is the wellspring of life.