Pierre Loti Quotes

Words are impotent to describe certain emotions.

It's hard for me to put my feelings into words.

I think that all the anger and cynicism comes from suppressing things that we always wanted.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in.

I don't try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

Words fall short sometimes.

You can only sit on the frustration of wanting to express something for so long.

The experiences and feelings I have are starting to outweigh the words available to explain them.

That was one of the saddest things about people--their most important thoughts and feelings often went unspoken and barely understood.

But the absence of tears wasn't the same as an absence of feeling.

He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.

Trying to convey an emotion through words is not easy.

I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel For words, like nature, half reveal And half conceal the soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain A use measured language lie's The sad mechanic exercise Like dull narcotic's, numbing pain In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er Like coarsest clothes against the cold But large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more.

Emotion is always new and the word has always served; therein lies the difficulty of expressing emotion.

The problem of the chimps is that they can only sit and look. They can't discuss what they feel. All that feeling is trapped within each one.

I've always been attracted to sad. If you look at Woody Allen movies, he's often playing a sad clown, and it's always been interesting. And angry clown is even more interesting.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.

Laughter isn't even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth.

...there's not enough ink and paper to say all I wanted.

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret". Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

One does not always know how to express the sorrow of the soul. One does not always know how to silence the joy of the heart.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.