Hatred is settled anger.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

What’s really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

I admire people who destroy themselves.

I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

Yes, it is one of my ultimate aims – it is the ultimate sense of football: to make the people happy, to let them live some emotions that you usually can’t get.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.

Seeing Pax get extra-nervous about which shirt he is going to wear when he meets Aung San Suu Kyi, I get very moved. He rightfully doesn’t get nervous going to a movie premiere; he gets nervous going to meet her.

Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

My body is weird. I wake up when the sun comes up, and it’s hard for me to go to sleep. My thoughts just take over.

We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

I think women love very hard. We love men. We just love with everything we have. And sometimes, I don’t know that that love is met with the type of dignity that we wish it would be met with.

Cycling is a joy and faster than many other modes of transport, depending on the time of day. It clears the head.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

Compassionate listening is to help the other side suffer less. If we realize that other people are the same people as we are, we are no longer angry at them.

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

We may define therapy as a search for value.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

I was called really horrible, profane names very loudly in front of huge crowds of people, and my schoolwork suffered at one point.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

If I couldn’t laugh I just would go insane, If we couldn’t laugh we just would go insane, If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane.

Alas, I am a woman friendless, hopeless!

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

You can’t blame gravity for falling in love.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.

If merely ‚feeling good‘ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather – you just have to get on with it.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition.

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

One good thing about acting in film is that it’s good therapy.

William Maxwell’s my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for ‚The New Yorker‘ called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in ‚The New Yorker‘ in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did – about emotions and places.

I don’t have many sad days.

A relationship can give you a gut wrenching feeling sometimes. It’s a real emotional ride.

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.

Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

I’m not ashamed to say I fear something.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.

I’m kind of claustrophobic… It’s not even like enclosed spaces. It’s like I hate being stuck in one band, you know? Just being stuck is the biggest drag, for fear that, you know, just that you can’t get out.

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.