Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object, which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured... anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object.
And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings.
No one can tell if I’m laughing or weeping. I wonder myself.
I'm not disappointed - just disappointed.
Sweet Skepticism of the Heart That knows and does not know And tosses like a Fleet of Balm Affronted by the snow.
Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered.
She looks honestly upset, but then, I’ve learned that I can’t read her. The problem with a really excellent liar is that you have to just assume they’re always lying.
It was funny how dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.
But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.
Whenever one of my children says, 'Goodnight, Daddy,' I always think to myself, 'You don't mean that.
Love: A term which has no meaning if defined.
She looked at the crowd and she felt simultaneously astonishment that they should stare at her when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible and a sense of fitness that they should be here that they should want to see it. Because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
I could not be so sure of Spring / Save that it sings in me.
I can watch a film, even a film that I've been in, and think, 'I'm not sure, 100 percent, what I think about it.' I'm not sure what I think about what I've done in it.
What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?
Morelli grabbed the front of my shirt, pulled me to him, and kissed me. It was a great kiss, but I didn't know what the heck it meant. It seemed to me a breaking up kiss would have had less tongue.
Ah. In my experience, when people say they don't know whether they love someone, they usually mean no.
I really didn't consider myself happy or unhappy.
She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.
Because love and hate were supposed to stand cleanly on opposite sides of the spectrum. The division seemed as clear as...well, angels and demons would once have seemed to her. Not anymore.
What I find interesting is how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I'm more interested in, there's the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious.
Mixed feelings, like mixed drinks, are a confusion to the soul.
