Emotions and Feelings

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior .

 

[ On the Iran-Contra scandal :] Clearly, mistakes were made.

 

And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always— take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

 

I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

 

[ Explaining how to fly :] You just think lovely wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air.

 

[ Response to being asked, “Where do you live?” :] Second to the right and then straight on till morning.

 

The unpublished manuscript is like an unconfessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

What a woman says to an eager lover, / write it on running water, write it on air.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

Real sorrow is incompatible with hope. No matter how great that sorrow may be, hope raises it one hundred cubits higher.

Real sorrow is incompatible with hope. No matter how great that sorrow may be, hope raises it one hundred cubits higher.

If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America.

A hush is over everything— / Silent as women wait for love, / The world is waiting for the spring.

In a crowd, on a journey at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.

Those who wish to seem learned to fools, seem fools to the learned. .

I had rather ride on an ass that carries me than a horse that throws me.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

True poetry, the best of it, is but the ashes of a burnt-out passion.

There is no one so bound to his own face that he does not cherish the hope of presenting another to the world.