emotional dissonance Quotes

I can't feel Irish to save my soul, but it's a fact.

I love you in my dreams, but not in real life.

My sympathies are Left. On paper and in the soul. But not in my heart or my guts.

We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.

Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.

...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not.

I have lived lies. I have done it again and again. I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love.-Marius

Sometimes I feel like I’m actually on the wrong planet. It’s great when I’m in my garden, but the minute I go out the gate I think, ‘What the hell am I doing here?

I didn't relate well to people my age. Maybe the truth was that I didn't relate well to people, period. Even my mother, who I was closer to than anyone else on the planet, was never in harmony with me, never on exactly the same page. Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. Maybe there was a glitch in my brain.

The surest sign that two people no longer speak the same language is that both say ironic things to one another but that neither senses the irony.

Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.

Ruin still used Reen's voice-it was familiar, something that had always seemed a part of her. Discovering that it belonged to that thing...it was like finding out that her reflection really belonged to someone else, and that she'd never actually seen herself.

When I'm carried away, isn't it clear that my heart contradicts my mouth?

My mother is a good woman - a very good woman - and I am, I think, not quite all criminality, but we do not pull together. I am a piece of machinery which, not understanding, my mother winds up the wrong way, setting all the wheels of my composition going in creaking discord.

It is perfectly possible to be enamoured of Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French.

That’s a funny thing: you think, when awful things happen, everything else just stops, like you would forget to pee and eat and get thirsty, but it’s not really true. It’s like you and your body are two separate things, like your body is betraying you, chugging on, idiotic and animal, craving water and sandwiches and bathroom breaks while your world falls apart.

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.

The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.

And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.

O marriage! marriage! what a curse is thine, Where hands alone consent and hearts abhor.

When we turn our backs on feelings we should deal with, they fester and grow and ultimately consume us. Silence is denial. Silence is anxiety.

Ah, well, being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to be a shallow person.