Quotes about Emotions

What we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.

There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

How easy it is to love a child, how hard to love what a child turns into!

Despite Marijana's bracing presence, he seems to be on the brink of one of his bad spells again, one of the fits of lugubrious self-pity that turn into black gloom. He likes to think they come from elsewhere, episodes of bad weather that cross the sky and pass on. He prefers not to think they come from inside him and are his, part of him

Two names on the page, his and hers, side by side. Two in a bed, lovers no longer but foes.

The first sip [of tea] is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.

She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.

And I go home having lost her love. And write this book.

Because he was always tremendously generated towards complete relationship with his women to the point where they ended up in one convoluted octopus mess of souls and tears and fellatio and hotel room schemes and rubbing in and out of cars and doors and great crises in the middle of the night... (p. 128)

I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been. Until then there is a lugubrious seriousness I love in all of this.

I'm not going to have the TV personality and be like, 'There's no bitterness. There's no ugliness.' There's bitterness. There's ugliness. There's pain. There's greed. There's malice, and there's hurt. That's all good stuff for any kind of art. I'm not necessarily feeding that side of myself, and I try not to encourage it too much.

I think love can be really tough. Because it involves ultimately an honesty to the nth degree that you are capable of. Once said, you've lost your deposit. It's best if you don't say it.