There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

Kissing someone is pretty intimate, actually very intimate, and your heart always kind of skips a beat before you do that.

I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‚yours,‘ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

There’s nothing better than having a baby. I’ve always loved children. I used to work summers at the YMCA and be in charge of, like, 30 preschool kids. I knew that when I had a child, I’d be overwhelmed, and it’s true… I can’t tell you how much my attitude has changed since we’ve got Frances. Holding my baby is the best drug in the world.

Religious faith, like political belief, should be based on reasoning, on the development of thought and feelings. The two things are inseparable.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

I have always said and felt that true enjoyment can not be described.

Bitterness is cancer – it eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure.

Generally speaking, if a human being never shows anger, then I think something’s wrong. He’s not right in the brain.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

Fear is real, but so is love.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

Just talk to me as a father – not what the Constitution says. What do you feel?

I left Mainz after 18 years and thought, ‚Next time, I will work with a little less of my heart.‘ I said that because we all cried for a week. The city gave us a goodbye party, and it lasted a week.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

Control thy passions lest they take vengence on thee.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is tired, hurt and bewildered.

I’m an emotional person.

In every parting there is an image of death.

No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

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.

There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

I fall in love every day. Not with people but with situations.

In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.

Love is a serious mental disease.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

Nothing is so aggravating than calmness.

Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

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.

What women need to understand is that men don’t communicate. It’s not intentional or on purpose. We’re just not as emotional. You ladies feel like you have to express yourselves.

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and to the young, it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares. I have had experience enough to know what I say.

When I am angry I can pray well and preach well.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

I’ve found men are less likely to let petty things annoy them.

I’m not generally a sensitive person, but I tend to be more sensitive toward others and what they’re going through. I don’t know if that’s the healthiest thing, but it’s the truth.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes.

She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.

Every single one of us has a few months here or there that feel like dark months.

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

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

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

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.