Quotes About Saying How You Feel

“I realized that the worst part of someone you love dying suddenly isn't the saying good-bye part. It's the part where you hope you said and did enough good stuff to make up for the bad stuff. It's the part where there are no second chances, no going back, no more opportunities to tell them how you feel about them.”

— Jennifer Brown

“Never apologize for saying what/how you feel. Cuz' that's like saying, "Sorry for being real".”

— Scott Ginsberg

“Believe me, Alex. I am trying. My fucking bed is too big for me. It feels empty now. I can't believe I'm even saying that, but whatever. That's how I feel. I want you back. I want you to move in. I want you with me again.”

— Tijan

“Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing."
Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me.
But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kindness."
He wiped my cheeks, saying Ssshh. I buried my face in his shoulder.
True kindness is stabilizing," I went on. "When you feel it and when you express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. Like all there is to achieve. It's life, demystified. A place out of self, a network of simple pleasures, not a waltz, but like whirls within a waltz."
You're the one now," Jack said definitively. "That's why you met her. She had something she had to pass on." (p. 95)”

— Hilary Thayer Hamann

“How can you regret never having found true love? That's like saying you regret not being born a genius. People don't have control over such things. It either happens or it doesn't. It's a gift - a present that most never get. It's more like a miracle, really, when you think of it. I mean, first you have to find that person, and then you have to get to know them to realize just what they mean to you - that right there is ridiculously difficult. Then ... then that person has to feel the same way about you. It's like searching for a specific snowflake, and even if you manage to find it, that's not good enough. You still have to find its matching pair. What are the odds?”

— Michael J. Sullivan

“The word itself creates an empty sensation. Try saying it now. "Why?" Notice how your tongue touches nothing when you form the word with your mouth. Feel the gap, the space inside your mouth, that it creates. The air. It is a place that needs filling. It is missing an answer.”

— Arlene J. Chai

“When you write a story, don't just write it - live it;
When putting words into the mouth of a protagonist (or any character) imagine yourself saying them and while writing about the reaction of the listener, write it the way you would react.
Let the conversations not be meant merely to be read but felt as well.
If you do not feel what you write; how can you expect the readers to feel it?”

— Arti Honrao

“So you're always honest," I said.
"Aren't you?"
"No," I told him. "I'm not."
"Well, that's good to know, I guess."
"I'm not saying I'm a liar," I told him. He raised his eyebrows. "That's not how I meant it, anyways."
"How'd you mean it, then?"
"I just ... I don't always say what I feel."
"Why not?"
"Because the truth sometimes hurts," I said.
"Yeah," he said. "So do lies, though.”

— Sarah Dessen

“I'm serious," I say. "I don't want to lose him."
"Then maybe you should go away for a little bit. After all, absence makes the heart grow horny, right?"
"That's not exactly how the saying goes."
"But it should, because you know it's true. If you go away for a couple of days, Ben won't know what to do with himself."
"Maybe you're right," I say, tossing more candy corn into my mouth (therapy in a bag).
"Damn straight, I am. Now, the biggest question: Can I fit into your suitcase? Because I really don't feel like staying here by myself.”

— Laurie Faria Stolarz

“As we drove I remembered how I had told myself I would make Simon happy. I didn't feel the same person. For I now knew that I had been stuffing myself up with a silly fairy tale, that I could never mean to him what Rose had meant. I think I knew it first as I watched his face while he listened to her singing, and then more and more, as he talked about the whole wretched business - not angrily or bitterly, but quietly and without ever saying a word against Rose. But most of all I knew it because a change in myself. Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you more than suffering yourself can.
Long before we got back to the castle, with all my heart and for my own heart's ease as well as his, I would have given her back to him if I could.”

— Dodie Smith

“Resist nothing. Like the Tibetan monk who once told me that he found peace by saying yes to all that happened. I met him again years later and reminded him of what he'd said. He laughed. "Perhaps," he said. "It does fit with my life philosophy." He had a lightness to him that is rare. His laugh, genuine. I almost expected him to levitate. If you think about it, how much time do we spend in our heads wishing things were another way, beating ourselves up, beating others up, crafting a different past, wishing for a different future? All of that is resistance. All of that is pain. Peace is letting it be. Letting life flow, letting emotions flow through you. If you don't fight them, they pass through quickly and you feel better.”

— Kamal Ravikant

“Whatever people do, feel, think, or say, don't take it personally. If they tell you how wonderful you are, they are not saying that because of you. You know you are wonderful. It is not necessary to believe other people who tell you that you are wonderful. Don't take anything personally.”

— Miguel Ruiz

“I love you," she said, not able to go on any longer without him hearing those words, without her saying them. "I always loved you. I never once stopped loving you. All those times I said I hated you, I never meant them, not once. I loved every part of you, every secret, every sin. I love what you are and what you do and how you make me feel so scared and so safe all at the same time.”

— Tiffany Reisz

“Not being offended is a way of saying, I have control over how I'm going to feel, and I choose to feel peaceful regardless of what I observe going on. When you feel offended, you're practicing judgment. You judge someone else to be stupid, insensitive, rude, arrogant, inconsiderate, or foolish, and then you find yourself upset and offended by their conduct. What you may not realize is that when you judge another person, you do not define them. You define yourself as someone who needs to judge others.”

— Wayne W. Dyer

“You two will figure it out. I know you will." Maybe we will, maybe we are, but not if she tells him. "You're very much alike. You both feel things very deeply, too deeply sometimes." What? "Jude and I have quite a bit of armor on us," she continues. "It takes a lot to break through it. Not you and Dad." This is news. I never thought I was anything like Dad. But what she's really saying is that we're both wusses. That's what Brian thinks too. I'm just someone who "draws pictures." And it burns in my chest that she thinks Jude's like her and I'm not. How come everything I think about our family keeps changing? How come the teams keep switching? Is this how all families are? And most importantly, how do I know she's not lying to me about not telling Dad?”

— Jandy Nelson

“Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Jesus always seems to be pairing God's forgiveness of us with our forgiveness of others. But why? Growing up, I thought it was a way of guilting us into forgiving others, like Jesus was saying, Hey, I died for you and you can't even be nice to your little brother? As though God can get us to do the right thing if God can just make us feel bad about how much we owe God. But that is not the God I see in Jesus Christ. That is a manipulative mother.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

“How we absorb music is unique. I know what I do. When I'm listening to music, I tend to find myself in a song. That's what really makes you connect is if you feel what that song is saying.”

— Amy Grant

“I wish to Heaven I was married," she said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing. "I'm tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I'm tired of acting like I don't eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I'm tired of saying, 'How wonderful you are!' to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it ... I can't eat another bite.”

— Margaret Mitchell

“Here's a quote from ultramarathoner Dick Collins: Decide before the race the conditions that will cause you to stop and drop out. You don't want to be out there saying, "Well gee, my leg hurts, I'm a little dehydrated, I'm sleepy, I'm tired, and it's cold and windy." And talk yourself into quitting. If you are making a decision based on how you feel at that moment, you will probably make the wrong decision.”

— Seth Godin

“My grandmother had a great saying. It always stuck with me: 'People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.' They've got to see it and feel it. And it's for real. And that's all. Be who you are.”

— Joe Manchin

“Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can't out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.”

— Elizabeth McCracken

“Then we talked a lot about our parents and how we didn't want to become them, but we had no other role models
or "maps," Alex kept saying. "My father is a terrible map, mostly because he doesn't ever lead me anywhere." And I thought about my parents being maps that led to places I didn't want to go
and it made a shocking amount of sense, using the word maps to describe parents. If almost made you feel like you could fold Mom and Dad up and lock them away in the glove compartment of your car and just joyride for the rest of your life maybe.”

— Matthew Quick

“I still do find it very difficult in the West to connect to this politeness of smiling, not saying how you're thinking or not saying how you really feel.”

— Waris Dirie

“Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour, I feel like saying to them: 'You simply don't understand - how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself?' But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.”

— Will Self

“Listening and hearing are two different things, and acting is comprehending what the person is saying, thinking how it makes you feel and responding. That's the key to really honest, truthful, compelling performance.”

— David Wenham

“I think we've met our quota for tearful reunions," she chuckled against the top of my head.
"When this is done, I promise I'm never going to leave the house ever again. We'll just stay in and order pizza and watch bad television."
Mom pulled away and looked over my shoulder. "Oh, I think you might want to get out every now and then," she said.
I felt the warm weight of Archer's hand on my waist. "Hey, I like pizza and bad TV."
I turned to him, surprised. "Your chest-"
"Cal," he said by way of explanation. "I owe that guy, like, a mountain of burgers. It's getting embarrassing."
Mom flashed me a little smile before saying, "You know, this isn't how I imagined meeting Sophie's first real boyfriend."
"Mom."
Archer gave me a little squeeze. "You mean I'm the first guy your parents have rescued from an enchanted island via use of a magic mirror? I feel so special.”

— Rachel Hawkins

“There's the fact of her being a hundred and four years old. I keep saying that's her age, but actually I'm just guessing. We don't really know for sure how old she is, and she claims she doesn't remember, either. When you ask her, she says,
"Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne."
... (footnote) Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne
"I have been alive for a very long time, haven't I?" Totally impossible to translate, but the nuance is something like: "I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I am humbly and deeply grateful. P. Arai calls it the "gratitude tense," and says the beauty of this grammatical construction is that "there is no finger pointed to a source." She also says, "It is impossible to feel angry when using this tense.”

— Ruth Ozeki

“When the woman said, "I don't need a piece of paper to love you," she was using a very specific definition of "love." She was assuming that love is, in its essence, a particular kind of feeling. She was saying, "I feel romantic passion for you, and the piece of paper doesn't enhance that at all, and it may hurt it." She was measuring love mainly by how emotionally desirous she was for his affection. And she was right that the marital legal "piece of paper" would do little or nothing directly to add to the feeling.”

— Timothy Keller

“It only takes one mistake,' the Dan Banyan guy says, 'and nothing else you ever do will matter.' With his empty hand, he takes one of my hands. His fingers feel hot, fever-hot, and pounding with his heartbeats. He turns my hand palm-up saying, 'No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you'll always be known for that one poor choice.' He sets the blue pill on my palm, saying, 'Do that one wrong thing- and you'll be dead for the rest of your life.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

“I don't know the word for the feeling if there is one, but it's that feeling you get - or I hope you get it, anyway - when you realize the smallness of you, and the largeness of Everything Else. I'm not saying God necessarily. I'm saying you're outside at night and it's raining and you don't have an umbrella and you're running to get inside but then you stop and maybe you hold your hands palms up and feel the rain pound against your fingerprints and soak through your clothes and your wet hair against your neck and you realize how amazing it is while the thunder cracks.”

— John Green

“People are surprised by how upset they get in this theater of distress. And then they get upset that they are upset. They often try to reassure themselves, saying things like, "Chill, chill, it's only a toy!" They are experiencing something new: you can feel bad about yourself for how you behave with a computer program. Adults come to the upside-down test knowing two things: the Furby is a machine and they are not torturers. By the end, with a whimpering Furby in tow, they are on new ethical terrain.”

— Sherry Turkle

“Whenever Ingrid and I got out of the suburbs, into Berkeley or San Francisco, and saw how other people lived, Ingrid would cry at the smallest of things- a little boy walking home by himself, a discarded cardboard sign saying HUNGRY PLEASE HELP. She would snap a picture, and by the time she lowered her camera, tears would already be falling. I always felt kind of guilty that I didn't feel as sad as she did, but now, watching Dylan, I think that's probably a good thing. I mean, you see a million terrible things every day, on the news and in the paper, and in real life. I'm not saying that it's stupid to feel sad, just that it would be impossible to let everything get to you and still get some sleep at night.”

— Nina LaCour

“When I step foot to my locker and change shoes for training, its like turning on a switch. I become a creature. Not a human. I look to tear apart anyone and everyone in my way to hugeness and I don't care how I do it. I can feel my heart start jumping and my body start saying "beat me into the ground like a red-headed step child. I want punishment" I WANT TO BE A FREAK, A FREAK I TELL YOU!!”

— Jason Bennett

“They gave high fives to all the players who say like the most obvious textbook answers in the world. It's like after each game, you already know what they're going to say. If they lost: "Ahh ... Tough loss." It's like, come on, how do you guys fall for that? And if they something that they really feel, everyone goes crazy. Like "Oohh! He's spazzing out!" Now he gotta say sorry for saying something he really felt. It's like, Oh lord.”

— Gilbert Arenas

“Crucial to how we feel is being aware of how we are feeling in the moment. The sine qua non of that is to realize that you are being emotional in the first place. The earlier you recognize an emotion, the more choice you will have in dealing with it. In Buddhist terms, it's recognizing the spark before the flame. In Western terms, it's trying to increase the gap between impulse and saying or doing something you might regret later.”

— Paul Ekman

“My music is more like ghetto gospel; there's a message in my words, so people listen. Sometimes you might here different things; it depends on how you feel. You might feel down, and I might be the cat in the same sentence saying, "You need to get up and do your thing." And then I could be the same cat, when you at the top of your game, telling you, "It feel good, don't it?" but with the same words.”

— Young Jeezy

“I often feel like saying, when I hear the question 'People aren't ready,' that it's like telling a person who is trying to swim, 'Don't jump in that water until you learn how to swim.' When actually you will never learn how to swim until you get in the water. And I think people have to have an opportunity to develop themselves and govern themselves.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“What bugs me is that you believe what you're saying. What bothers me is that you don't know how you feel. What scares me is that while you're telling me stories, you actually believe that they are real.”

— Ani DiFranco

“I write a lot of songs about being in love, how beautiful women are but I've definitely experienced that other side of love where you're in a situation where you love a girl so much but you just know for a fact that she doesn't love you the same. "Grenade" is the extreme way of saying "I'd do anything for you and why can't I feel you would do the same for me?”

— Bruno Mars

“I'm not interested in saying what people should and shouldn't do. It depends on how people feel about themselves. I suppose personally if you do anything out of fear or to mask who you are, then that's a bit scary. You've got to work with what you got ...”

— Cate Blanchett

“I'm tired of saying, "How wonderful you are!" to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it.”

— Margaret Mitchell