It’s your job to make the reader feel the desperation.
Robert Caro
Tag: emotion
… It means when you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real.
Man in Black, Westworld
The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.
Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (via quoted-books)
Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.
Rumi, The book of love: poems of ecstasy and longing
I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.
Mark Rothko
And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.
I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
…if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
I am this groping intensity that is a soul.
Jorge Luis Borges, My Whole Life, Selected Poems 1923-1967 (via starseas)
I know how humans love. Their passion burns like a lump of sugar – quick and hot. And when the fire dies, they seek a new flame. They chase sparks instead of collecting the warmth of old embers.
Melissa Landers, Invaded (via quoted-books)
secretive dreams 