“In the world of the Machiguenga, sadness could be equated with anger, and anger was a perilous emotion, by which a foreigner could lose his life.”
Source: House of the Tiger King : The Quest for a Lost City
“I stand in the dark, start to unbutton. Then I hear something inside my body. I've broken, something has cracked, that must be it. Noise is coming up, coming out, of the broken place, in my face. Without warning: I wasn't thinking about here or there or anywhere. If I let the noise get out into the air it will be laughter, too loud, too much of it, someone is bound to hear.”
“You're so cynical," Tiny says, waving his hand at me.
"I'm not cynical, Tiny," I answer. "I'm practical."
"You're a robot," he says. Tiny thinks that I am incapable of what humans call emotion because I have not cried since my seventh birthday, when I saw the movie All Dogs Go to Heaven. I suppose I should have known from the title that it wouldn't end merrily, but in my defense, I was seven. Anyway, I haven't cried since then. I don't really understand the point of crying. Also, I feel that crying is almost--like, aside from deaths of relatives or whatever-- totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules: 1. Don't care too much. 2. Shut up. Everything unfortunate that has ever happened to me has stemmed from failure to follow one of the rules.”
Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.”
Source: The Lords of Discipline
“Emotion as well as reason belongs to the very stuff of history.”
Source: Historians in the Middle Ages
“Mindless action without a real understanding of the ramifications is only likely to result in serious miscalculations or a colossal waste of time. Avoid both by using your judgment, filtered through both knowledge and experience. Use common sense and logic as a counterbalance to emotion.”
Source: The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions
“It is not the past that shapes lived emotional experience, but rather the act of remembering in the present. To remember a particular emotion from the past implies that in the instant of remembering in the present emotions are created.”
“Wash yourself with the emotion. It won't hurt you. It will only help.”
Source: Tuesdays With Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
“In truth she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when the sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have moved her to great compassion. But so long accustomed to suppress emotion and keep down reality, so long schooled for her own purposes in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart like flies in amber and spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and bad, the feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless, she had subdued even her wonder until now.”
Source: Bleak House
“States of the atmosphere pass into us as water through the meshes of a sieve, and storms occur in us before they break upon the world without, creating restless sensations. ("Absolute Evil")”
Source: American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps