Quotes about feelings
page 33

“Don't you hate it? Not ever saying how you really feel?”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Hate

“In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Understanding, Moving On

“Jace hated it when other people were worried on his behalf. It made him feel like maybe there really was something to worry about.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Hate, People

“You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Silence

“Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other's hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn't feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet.”

Michelle Tea (1971) American writer

Source: Rose of No Man's Land

Pain, Beauty, Personality

“So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer book The Cost of Discipleship

Source: The Cost of Discipleship

People, Home

“What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

Love

“Feelings are facts. Look straight at 'em and deal with 'em. Work it through, as honestly as you can. If God is anything like a middle-class white chick from the suburbs, which I admit is a long shot, it's what you do about what you feel that matters.”

Mary Doria Russell The Sparrow

Source: The Sparrow

God

“In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

As quoted in Bisexual Characters in Film: From Anaïs to Zee (1997) by Wayne M. Bryant, p. 143
Attributed

Love, Fear

“Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?”

Yukio Mishima book Confessions of a Mask

Source: Confessions of a Mask (1949), p. 208.
Context: I received an impassioned letter from Sonoko. There was no doubt that she was truly in love. I felt jealous. Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?

Love, World, Jealousy

“We don't go to the ocean for anything as simple as happiness, do we? We
go there to feel alive. Like life, the ocean holds chance and change, grief and terror and beauty. It promises mortality, not peace.”

Eileen Wilks Tempting Danger

Source: Tempting Danger

Life, Happiness, Peace, Beauty

“It made him feel indispensable and needed - even if the fact that Jocelyn didn't appear to care wheather he slept in her daughter's bed or not did underscore that Clary's mother apparently regarded him as about sexually threatening as a goldfish.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Appearance, Daughters

“What are you up to now?" "I'm sill crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

Love

“the moment you don't feel like praying, get on your knees. And the moment you don't feel like reading your bible, you'd better get that Book open.”

Lori Wick American writer

Source: Where the Wild Rose Blooms

Books, Reading

“A wise man once said that we can't make anyone feel or do anything. We can throw things into the wind, but it's up to each person to decide how they want to react, where they want to stand when things fall.”

Jonathan Maberry book Dust & Decay

Source: Dust & Decay

Personality

“You'll never be able to let him go. You'll always feel wrong about being with me.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Gale and Katniss (p. 197)
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)
Context: "I don't stand a chance if he doesn't get better. You'll never be able to let him go. You'll always feel wrong about being with me."
"The way I always felt wrong kissing him because of you," I say.

“There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics

Hate, Envy

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Way, Reality

“I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter XV: "Recapitulation and Conclusion", page 421 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=449&itemID=F391&viewtype=image, in the sixth (1872) edition <br class="br">Source: The Origin of Species

“And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: Girl With Curious Hair

Heart

“He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.”

Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove

Source: Lonesome Dove

Men, Happiness

“I can't say for sure, because I have no experience, but -- well, is this what family is like? The feeling that everyone's connected, that with one piece missing the whole thing's broken?”

Trenton Lee Stewart The Mysterious Benedict Society

Source: The Mysterious Benedict Society

Family

“It's like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn't move.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

Love, Passion

“Follow your feelings. If it feels right, move forward. If it doesn't feel right, don't do it.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

“Ask once, believe you have received, and all you have to do to receive is feel good.”

Rhonda Byrne book The Secret

Source: The Secret

“If I feel ragged, my prep team seems in worse condition, knocking back coffee and sharing brightly colored little pills. As far as I can tell, they never get up before noon unless there's some sort of national emergency, like my leg hair.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Color, Coffee

“Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Source: Life After God

Age, Sincerity

“Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

Source: The Year of the Flood

World, Beauty

“I know how this feels: the tightening of the chest, the panic, the what-have-I-done-wait-I-was-kidding. Eating disorders linger so long undetected, eroding the body in silence, and then they strike. The secret is out. You're dying.”

Marya Hornbacher book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Secret, Silence, Waiting

“I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.”

James Thurber book The 13 Clocks

Source: The 13 Clocks

Sadness, Heart

“You feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that’s okay… That’s alright because we’re all meant to be like that at twenty-four.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Life

“Wow. The guy can make me feel stupid even when he's telling me I don't have to let him make me feel stupid.”

Kelley Armstrong book The Summoning

Source: The Summoning

Stupidity, Guy

“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 119
Context: In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request.

Life, Death, Fear, Decision

“Sometimes when things are particularly bad, my brain will give me a happy dream. […] When I fully awaken, I'm momentarily comforted. I try to hold on to the peaceful feeling of the dream, but it quickly slips away, leaving me sadder than ever.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Happiness, Peace, Dreams

“But grieving people are selfish. They won’t let you comfort them and they say you don’t understand and they make you feel useless when all your life you’ve been functional to them.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: The Piper's Son

Life, People, Understanding, Selfishness

“I merely feel emptyness. A hollow of dead brush where flowers use to bloom.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Flowers, Dead

“She'd absolutely adored the library_an entire building where anyone could take things they didn't own and feel no remorse about it.”

Ally Carter book Heist Society

Source: Heist Society

“And then it was all happening, what had started to happen at least twice before. Feelings so sweet and strong she could hardly bear it. Strange recognition, unexpected belonging…impossible knowing…”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 2

Strong

“I’m a word freak. I like words. I’ve always compared writing to music. That’s the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it’s like music.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Music, Way

“It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Being and Nothingness

Source: Being and Nothingness

Thinking

“No Daimon gets out of here alive. (They hit the invisible wall and rebounded off it.) Man. It really makes you feel for the bug on the windshield, doesn’t it? (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Night Embrace

Source: Night Embrace

“stanchion, n.

I don't want to be the strong one, but I don't want to be the weak one either. Why does it feel like it's always one or the other? When we embrace, one of us is always holding the other a little tighter.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Strong

“I am beginning to feel the need of a glass of wine to fortify myself against this conversation.”

Naomi Novik book His Majesty's Dragon

Source: His Majesty's Dragon

Wine

“Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Source: Every Last One

“I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. I've got to think.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Thinking, Time

“There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us.”

Marilynne Robinson Gilead

Source: Gilead

World, Beauty

“Now I feel like James Bond. Suave and intelligent, breaking all the codes while looking fabulous.”

Jim Butcher Dead Beat

Source: Dead Beat

Intelligence

“The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.”

Alexander McCall Smith book The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

Source: The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

Love

“Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.”

Richard Adams book Watership Down

Source: Watership Down

Winter

“… no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

Source: Identity

Way

“She had not really a sensitive soul, but to put it in exact terms, was possessed by an uncontrollable feeling of mind”

Alessandro Baricco book Ocean Sea

Source: Ocean Sea

Soul

“I'm just not having a very good time and I don't have any reason to think it'll get anything but worse. I'm tired. I'm hurt. I'm sad. I feel used.”

Marsha Norman 'night, Mother

Source: 'night, Mother

Sadness, Thinking, Time, Hurt

“A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“Okay, if this is what falling in love feels like, someone please kill me now. (Not literally, overzealous
readers.) But it was all too much—too much emotion, too much happiness, too much longing, perhaps
too much ice cream…”

James Patterson book Maximum Ride

Source: Max

Love, Happiness

“You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

Death

“Jacoblike a totally normal young man. He's clearly intelligent. But having his day disrupted probably makes him feel the same way I would if I was suddenly told to bungee off the top of the Sears Tower.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

Way, Intelligence

“The thing to do when one feels sure that he has said or done the right thing and is condemned, is to stand still and keep quiet. If he is right, time will show it.”

Booker T. Washington book Up from Slavery

Source: Up from Slavery

Time

“I have so many different personalities in me and I still feel lonely.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

Personality

“In his eyes, there was no trace of what had happened earlier, and I could feel something inside me break. So that was that. We were finally, finally over.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

Goodbye

“Even the solitude, I've actually grown to quite like… I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I'll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go

Cars, Solitude

“Wherever people feel safe (…) they will be indifferent.”

Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others

Source: Regarding the Pain of Others

People, Indifference

“So what’d you do to the lesser?” a male voice said.
“I lit his cigarette with a sawed-off,” another one answered. “He didn’t come down for breakfast, you feel me?”

Jessica Bird book Dark Lover

Source: Dark Lover

“Holly frowned at her. "Glad to see you've forgiven yourself so quickly."
"Harboring feelings of guilt can have a negative affect on mental health."
"Child geniuses," growled Holly.
"Genii," said Minerva.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Lost Colony

Health

“Adrian frowned.
'Is that a noose?'
'It's a tie!' I cried, trying not to feel offended. He laughed, clearly delighted at this.
'My mistake.”

Richelle Mead book The Indigo Spell

Source: The Indigo Spell

“… in the end, all I want is to be with him. It's the only way my life feels complete.”

Alyson Nöel book Shadowland

Source: Shadowland

Life, Way

“I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe.”

Jean-Dominique Bauby book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Source: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Love

“I don't know. I just feel stuck, like I'm afraid to take any steps, in case they're the wrong ones.”

Rebecca Stead book When You Reach Me

Source: When You Reach Me

“I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

People, Sense, Help

“Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Effort

“Things feel like they'll be forever, but they aren't. Love can go away, or people can, without even meaning to. Nothing is guaranteed.”

Jenny Han book P.S. I Still Love You

Source: P.S. I Still Love You

Love, People

“We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Pain, Time

“Why do I feel like I can't trust you anymore?'

I wanted him to lash out. I wanted him to fight, to protest, to argue- to do anything but look deeper into my eyes and say, 'because the Gallagher Academy doesn't admit fools”

Ally Carter book Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover

Source: Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover

Fools, Fight

“The First Splendid Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.”

Gretchen Rubin (1966) American writer

Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Happiness, Truth, Thinking

“I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Men, Beauty

“A blind man can see what she feels for you and you for her. Your souls are not merely entwined; they are fused.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

Soul

“Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any woman who both thinks and feels deeply.”

Sena Jeter Naslund (1942) American writer

Source: Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer