"We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail."
— David Sedaris (Naked)

"It's easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

"Why are you leaving me?
He wrote, I do not know how to live.
I do not know either but I am trying.
I do not know how to try.
There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me"
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.
Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"i can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. it expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. "
— Virginia Woolf

"A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself."
— Toni Morrison

"Anything that feels good couldn't possibly be bad."
— Angelina Jolie

"Don’t bother trying to explain your emotions. Live everything as intensely as you can and keep whatever you felt as a gift from God. The best way to destroy the bridge between the visible and invisible is by trying to explain your emotions."
— Paulo Coelho (Brida)

"If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your heard even, you experience them fully and completely."
— Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson)

"Feelings do not grow old along with the body. Feelings form part of a world I don’t know, but it’s a world where there’s no time, so space, no frontiers."
— Paulo Coelho (Brida)

""I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas. . . . Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It's about words. It's about a man dealing with life. Okay?" "
— J. R. Moehringer

"I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold."
— Albert Camus (The Plague)

"Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd."
— Edith Sitwell

"Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed."
— Patrick Ness (The Ask and the Answer)

"Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love."
— M. Scott Peck

"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."
— Rabindranath Tagore

"Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.' Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling."
— bell hooks

"When animals express their feelings they pour out like water from a spout. Animals' emotions are raw, unfiltered, and uncontrolled. Their joy is the purest and most contagious of joys and their grief the deepest and most devastating. Their passions bring us to our knees in delight and sorrow."
— Marc Bekoff (The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy - and Why They Matter)

"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . . "
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience."
— John Cage (Silence: Lectures and Writings)

"[M]y favorite teacher. . . . was explaining that you don't say but however . . . . These are pleonasms. . . . the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. . . .There are times in life that are very 'but however.'"
— Stefano Benni (Margherita Dolce Vita)

"Reason must know the heart's reasons and every other reason"
— Leonora Carrington

"Alas, that love, whose view is muffled still,
Should, without eyes, see pathways to his will!
Where shall we dine? O me! What fray was here?
Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.
Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! Serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
Dost thou not laugh?"
— William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)

"There is art in my fingertips,
a poem in my head,
a song brushing past my lips,
a piano being fed.

A mic waiting to be held,
a pen waiting to be used;
Waiting for the perfect hand
and a voice to be felt.

This is: EMOTION"
— Melinda Pitkin

"Our tears are precious, necessary, and part of what make us such endearing creatures."
— David Richo (The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them)

"She was not one for emptying her face of expression. "
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"I can imagine no greater catastrophe than if I were mistaken, and the theory were correct that what I consider secondary instincts or drives are actually primary instincts! Because in that case the emotional plague would rest upon the support of a natural law while its archenemies, truth and sociality, would be relying upon unfounded ethics. Until now both lies and truth have taken recourse to ethics. But only lies have profited because they were able to appear under the guise of truth. Under these circumstances, egoism, theft, petty selfishness, slander, etc., would be the natural rule. (26.july.1943)"
— Wilhelm Reich (American Odyssey: Letters & Journals, 1940-1947)

"We got to give them hope, we got to give them hope."
— Harvey Milk

"Too much stress cannot be laid...upon the admonition that we seek so far as possible to live in the lives of other people. By sharing in the misfortunes of others, and rejoicing in their happiness, you add to your own emotional serenity and stability."
— Ralph Alfred Habas (The Art of Self-Control)

"[D]ie Vernunft ist, wenn sie allein waltet, eine einengende Kraft; und unbewacht ist die Leidenschaft eine Flamme, die bis zur Selbstzerstörung brennt."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"The "stiff, dead, retracted pelvis" is one of man's most frequent vegetative disturbances. It is responsible for lumbago as well as for hemorrhoidal disturbances. Elsewhere, we shall demonstrate an important connection between these disturbances and genital cancer in women, which is so common.
Thus, the "deadning of the pelvis" has the same function as the deadening of the abdomen, i.e., to avoid feelings, particularly those of pleasure and anxiety."
— Wilhelm Reich (The Function of the Orgasm)

"Like two side to a coin, there are two sides to life: your reason and emotional facets."
— amiblackwelder

""Hate is truly love reflected in a black mirror...""
— alexis semon