feelings

How about we never talk about what happened and why I feel the way I feel. We just pretend that everything is fine and I just scrub myself red every night, allowing my mind and body to retreat into oblivion. Yup sounds like the perfect plan.

The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief. I had always viewed feelings as a weakness-annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. And I finally didn't have to feel them anymore.

I don't think you feel much of anything anymore.

To hide feelings when you are near crying is the secret of dignity.

The irony is that there is nothing purer than sorrow.

That is the worst thing about despair: it is not constant, any more than love is.

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

I thought by masking the depression with silence, the feelings might disappear.

It wasn't that she was sad__adness had very little to do with it, really, considering that most of the time, she felt close to nothing at all. Feeling required nerves, connections, sensory input. The only thing she felt was numb. And tired. Yes, she very frequently felt tired.

People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.

You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings. Words are leaky vessels into which a cargo of meaning and emotion are placed, and when they leave you and reach the farther shore of another mind a considerable portion of that cargo has been lost at sea. Fallen overboard, gone to rot, consumed by vermin, decayed to a state unlike its original form.

I want to say more, but don't know what the words are supposed to be. I feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable night time conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there's no room in the air.

And empty words are evil.

Words. Just little black marks on paper. Just sounds in the empty air. But think of the power they have! They can make you laugh or cry, love or hate, fight or run away. They can heal or hurt. They even come to look and sound like what they mean. Angry looks angry on the page. Ugly sounds ugly when you say it.

Why do you look so sad?""Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.

Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise.

Because all her feelings for him _ hot and beautiful in her heart _ turned to gobbledygook in her mouth.

The brain. Where words mean something. The heart. Where words feel something. When both work together. Kaboom.