"And what emotion have you chosen to depict?"
"Anger, Jealousy, Bitterness, Tiredness, Hope, Lust... Love."
"A veritable feast. So where is it?"
"It's everywhere."
"My dear girl, I'm not sure I understand."
"Its conceptual. You just can't see it."
"You're saying you haven't done it?"
"No I'm saying you can't see it."
"Are there any quotes that make you cringe?" Yes. Yes, there are. There are quotes that horrify and fascinate and charm and repulse me, frequently all at the same time. Here are some quotes for you I've collected over the years, about the veritable feast of emotions that exists all around us beyond our eyes.
“I’m sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.”
—Richard Siken from “Little Beast”
“You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.”
—Marilyn Hacker from “Nearly a Valediction”
“I don’t want to be around you. I don’t want to drink you in. I want to walk into the heart of you and never walk back out. “
—Nico Alvarado from “Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls”
“Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers.”
—Margaret Atwood from “The Good Bones”
"You left the East Wind to me," said Gimli, "but I will say naught of it."
"That is as it should be," said Aragorn. "In Minas Tirith they endure the East Wind, but they do not ask it for tidings."
―J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
“I wanted to write ‘stay’ on your sides, surround your bed with oceans of salt. I hope he folds you into a fox, loves you like a splintered arrow, brandishes the kill of your lips. May the bouquet of your hips wither. May the wolves forget your name.”
—J. Bradley
"I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse."
―Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."
―C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.”
—Jeffrey McDaniel
“I belong deeply to myself.”
—Warsan Shire, 34 Excuses for Why We Failed at Love
“If you love something set it free. If it returns, burrows into your ribs, devours your heart & becomes your new heart, it was meant to be.”
—Night Vale Podcast
“You stand red-handed. You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grass.
What are you supposed to do with all this loss?”
—Margaret Atwood, Down
"I love you," Matt said.
"I love you, too," Maria replied. "I know that's a sin, and I'll probably go to hell for it."
"If I have a soul, I'll go with you," promised Matt.
—Nancy Farmer, The House of the Scorpion
“I speak rain. I spin you a night and you hide in it.”
—Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems: 1965-1975
“ (…) Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated
cities at the center of me, and here is the center of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from, but I can’t go through with it. I just don’t want to die anymore.”
—Richard Siken, Saying Your Names
“Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars.”
—Victor Hugo, Ninety Three
"For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves."
―James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
"'I said it not because of your dishonour and your sin, but because of your great suffering. That you are a great sinner is true,' he added, almost exultantly, 'but your greatest sin is that you have abandoned and destroyed yourself in vain. Is that not horrible? Is it not horrible that you live in this filth, which is so loathsome to you, while at the same time you know (you have only to open your eyes) that you are helping nobody by it, and not saving anybody from anything? Tell me,' he said, almost frenziedly, 'how such shame and such basement can exist in you side by side with other feelings, so different and so holy!'"
―Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
"There isn't a person you wouldn't love if you could read their story."
―Marjorie Hinckley
“'You’ll always be a hyena etc...,' yells the devil, who’d crowned me with such pretty poppies. 'Deserve death with all your appetites, your selfishness, and all the capital sins!'
Ah! I’ve been through too much. But, sweet Satan, I beg of you, a less blazing eye! and while waiting for the new little cowardly gestures yet to come, since you like an absence of descriptive or didactic skills in a writer, let me rip out these few ghastly pages from my notebook of the damned."
―Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
"The clearness was only outward; within was a wandering flame."
―Virginia Woolf, Orlando.
"And day by day, as the process went on, that idea of the Straight or the Normal which had occurred to him during his first visit to this room, grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it had become some kind of mountain. He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one's own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up over him - something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to."
―C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
