William Wordsworth Quotes

Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.

I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.

I think there must have been some other girl printed somewhere in his heart, for he was a man of love and his wife was not a woman to show her feelings.

And we are a people without tears. The things that moved our parents do not move us at all.

The other day, when my 4-year-old saw a flowering tree and said, "Daddy, it's raining petals," that was poetry that just melted my heart into a mushy, yummy Fudgsicle.

It was not the house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.

He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.

Once you've stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart's just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don't love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim's incredulity's potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh.

I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man.

Dena had always been a loner. She did not feel connected to anything. Or anybody. She felt as if everybody else had come into the world with a set of instructions about how to live and someone had forgotten to give them to her. She had no clue what she was supposed to feel, so she had spent her life faking at being a human being, with no idea how other people felt. What was it like to really love someone? To really fit in or belong somewhere? She was quick, and a good mimic, so she learned at an early age to give the impression of a normal, happy girl, but inside she had always been lonely.

under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed

Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum - many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!

Dona Crista laughed a bit. "Oh, Pip, I'd be glad for you to try. But do believe me, my dear friend, touching her heart is like bathing in ice." I imagine. I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire.

He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast; and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, became drowsy through indifference to the vibrations of a love whose subtleties he could no longer distinguish.

Hinged to forgetfulness like a door, she slowly closed out of sight, and she was the woman I loved, but too many times she slept like a mechanical deer in my caresses, and I ached in the metal silence of her dreams.

You have an incredible body." He reaches out to touch my stomach. I feel no pleasure in his compliment or his touch, only impatience. This is the only feeling. I feel like the paper on which my mood chart is printed.

I fear that a life of death has made me numb to both.

This is the world we live in, a world of safety and happiness and order, a world without love. A world where children crack their heads on stone fireplaces and nearly gnaw off their tongues and the parents are concerned. Not heartbroken, frantic, desperate. Concerned, as they are when you fail mathematics, as they are when they are late to pay their taxes.

The dance of the flower in the wind, in the sun, in the rain, cannot be understood by the head; the heart has to be open for it.

But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.

There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart; he does not feel for man.

When a man can look upon the simple wild-rose, and feel no pleasure, his taste has been corrupted.