emotional vocabulary Quotes

In later life, we don't easily talk of fears, but instead we discuss our 'concerns.' Fear seems too primal and hysterical, but concern is polite and intellectual and nicely under control.

We have so many words for states of the mind, and so few for states of the body.

For example, there's no word emocionó in English, so I have to say, "You, you really emotioned me," It's more precise, even though it sounds odd. "My father emotioned me." Or "That performance really emotioned to me."

David tells me that fairies never say 'We feel happy': what they say is, 'We feel dancey'.

In the English language, I can love my car, or my house, or my daughter, or traveling, but in Greek and how I grew up, love is described with different words.

Like “love,” “hope” is one of those ridiculously disproportional words that by all rights should be a lot longer.

We don't teach kids how to feel, we don't give them the words to go by.

Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.

You and I must realize that the English language is filled with words that, in addition to their literal meanings, convey distinct emotional intensity. For example, if you develop a habit of saying you 'hate' things - you 'hate' your hair; you 'hate' your job; you 'hate' having to do something - do you think this raises the intensity of your negative emotional states more than if you use a phrase like 'I prefer something else'?

What can she possibly teach you, twenty seven names for tears?

One of the frustrations about the modern world is that we don't even have a good vocabulary to describe our state. The word sentiment sounds mushy. [...] Sentiment is not mushy.

Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.

English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing.

My dad, like many Southern men, is this very emotionally expressive person who isn't as articulate in words about his feelings as he is with breaking a chair or something like that.

English is weak in describing emotional states or intensities of interpersonal relationships.

Actors are part of a certain percentage of people on this planet who have an emotional vocabulary as a primary experience. It's as if their life is experienced emotionally and then that is translated intellectually or conceptually into the performance.

Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life.

Griddle cakes, pancakes, hot cakes, flapjacks: why are there four names for grilled batter and only one word for love?

It is less fun to talk about what I am feeling rather than what I am thinking. Saying 'I feel awesome' isn't really interesting or enquiring.

And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are: Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth.