Complicated Feelings Quotes & Sayings

In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words. — Ted Hughes

I like things that are never one way. Usually, emotionally, I make the films based on a type of energy. I try to work with things that are more difficult to articulate. And so, that's more of a feeling. And so, the things that have attracted me are more of the things that are morally complicated or emotionally complicated. — Harmony Korine

The story of Carol's transformation evoked complicated feelings in Rose. It appalled her, of course. The idea of an educated, metropolitan woman voluntarily casting off every vestige of modernity in order to make herself over as a medieval ghetto-dweller was unconscionable - but it also inspired a sneaking envy. By submitting to the restraints of Orthodoxy, Carol had not only performed an impressive act of self-denial - an act guaranteed to appeal to Rosa's ascetic sensibility - but also freed herself from the burden of trying to improvise her own moral code. These days, she always knew what the right thing to do was - or if she didn't, she knew a rabbi who did. Every aspect of her daily life was consonant with her convictions. — Zoe Heller

I've definitely been in relationships with friends where I wanted to do something different than I know a friend has. It's that complicated balance between wanting to do what you know is right for you and not wanting to hurt someone's feelings. — Mickey Sumner

We hurt each other, is the point. Hurt, annoy, embarrass, but move on. People, it just doesn't work that way. Your own feelings get so complicated that you forget the ways another human being can be vulnerable. You spend a lot of energy protecting yourself. All those layers and motivations and feelings. You get hurt, you stay hurt sometimes. The hurt affects your ability to go forward. And words. All the words between us. Words can be permanent. Certain ones are impossible to forgive. — Deb Caletti

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular. And you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings as vast as your own, who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddys in the nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks to loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress making, and knows inside herself that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone.
Slavery is the same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and describes this world in essential texts. A world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave. Hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Sydney, don't leave Adrian because of me."
"It's more complicated than that," I said automatically.
"It's really not," she said. "From everything I've seen and heard, you're just afraid. You've always controlled every detail of your life. When you couldn't-like with the Alchemists-you found a way to seize back that control."
"There is nothing wrong with wanting control," I snapped.
"Except that we can't always have it, and sometimes that is a good thing. A great thing, even," she added. "And that's how it is with Adrian. No matter how hard you try, you aren't going to be able to control your feelings for him. You can't help loving him, and so you're running away. I'm just an excuse. — Richelle Mead

I still have sadness and complicated feelings about my divorce. But how beneficial is it to keep hanging onto those feelings? If someone lives through an accident, his aim is to become better and healthy. My aim is always to progress - to make better decisions and be a better father, a better boyfriend, a better husband if it happens again. — Ryan Phillippe

I don't think we feel only one thing in our lives. I don't think it's simple as either (a) being in love or (b) not being in love. I think our feelings for each other are really complicated and motivated by an endless interconnected web of desires and fears.
I wanted to reflect that as best as I could — John Green

Today is felt to be the most complicated day in our lives and rarely in trying to deal with the issues of today, are we aware of the impact of the past on those issues. — Martha Char Love

What they failed to teach you at school was that the whole business of being human just got messier and more complicated as you got older. You could tell the truth, be polite, take everyone's feelings into consideration and still have to deal with other people's shit. At nine or ninety. — Mark Haddon

And when I'm writing well and when I'm inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency. — Edward Hirsch

This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I Am ... I Said is a very complicated song and its complicated probably because my feelings were very complicated when I wrote it. — Neil Diamond

Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It's two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I'd know it was something true. Now I'm trying to dig deeper. I didn't want to write these pages until there were no hard feelings, no sharp ones. I do not have that luxury. I am sad and angry and I want everyone to be alive again. I want more landmarks, less landmines. I want to be grateful but I'm having a hard time with it. — Richard Siken

To give to one another and receive from one another is the purpose of a relationship. We don't need a lot of words. When we share time with someone, what is important is to communicate with feelings, not with words. But if we want to share words, we don't need anything complicated. It's just three words: "I love you." That's it. What makes you happy is not the love that other people feel for you, but the love you feel for other people. — Miguel Ruiz

I suppose we acquire most of our feelings about our bodies too early, and in ways too complicated, to make them easy to account for. — Charis Wilson

Not everyone has a shiny, perfect kind of love. Sometimes it's messy, complicated, and painful. It doesn't lessen the depth of the feelings involved though. — Sydney Landon

I wanted to dissolve into the floor, mixing myself with the hard stone. A stone had a single purpose: to be. No complicated promises, no worries and no feelings. — Maria V. Snyder

Do you know what the lurid intermixture of complicated emotions produces, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne? That's right, it produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions. Ryan MacDonald's glorious shards of prose are both lurid and blazing, and together they comprise an anthology of complex feelings-dream-like, vivid, and never, ever obvious. — Chris Bachelder

The human being is so complicated in some ways, and yet so simple in others. Sometimes, we need complex medication regimens. Yet, sometimes, we just need a good cry. — Vironika Tugaleva

What I find, particularly with young writers and readers, is that they don't want complicated feelings. — Marlon James

I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm. — Osamu Dazai

It's hard to do that with people who think emotionally. A lot of people think in terms of people, emotions, and feelings. That's more complicated. Engineering mentality makes it, in theory, a little easier. — Marc Andreessen

With my son, falling off his bike is usually what makes him upset, so a hug goes a long way. But girls are more complicated; my daughter will get bummed out because her friend hurt her feelings. In that case, we'll talk about it. I'll tell her that she's a great friend, and that she needs to talk to her friends about it. — Summer Sanders

Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer's job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean. — Octavia E. Butler

I'm not difficult," Violet said. "I'm simple. I like good books and clever conversation and being left alone much of the time. How does that make me difficult? I make sense? I don't talk about my feelings, of course, but then, I don't want to." She shrugged. "So that's reasonable."
Sebastian smiled despite himself, a smile that felt bitter even to him. "God, no. Not feelings. Heaven forbid that you have anything so messy."
"I have feelings." She spoke stiffly. "I just don't talk about them. What's the point? Talking never changes them. — Courtney Milan

This," Alaric explained to Sarah in what he thought was a kindly voice, "isn't love you're feeling. Only dopamine. Because Felix isn't like anyone else you know. Being a creature of the night, he's new and exciting and activates a neurotransmitter in your brain that releases feelings of euphoria when you're around him ... especially because you know you can never actually be together, and he seems complicated, and perhaps even sensitive and vulnerable at times. But I can assure you: he's anything but."
"How dare you?" Sarah demanded hotly. "It isn't dopa ... whatever! It's love! Love! — Meg Cabot

I still feel like teenage girls are not taken seriously by the culture at large, especially not their darker or more complicated feelings - of aggression, desire, ambition. To me, these feelings and drives are so fundamental to girlhood and to womanhood, and I love exploring them. And trying to give voice to them as best I can. I think women are always trying to figure out their own adolescence. We never stop. — Megan Abbott

There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection. — Andre Gide

I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones. — Matthew Specktor

Today is WOUND FREE WEDNESDAY! You start to feel it during the Holiday season; a tug in your heart, the friction within your soul, all the past complicated feelings that rise up. Choose to stay in the moment with the life you are living NOW instead of allowing the past to dictate you choices, feelings, and responses. Be love, be compassion, rise above the past and stay in the moment. BE the GRATITUDE that is within you. — Midge Noble

I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even. — Edan Lepucki

We have endless books about whether Jesus existed, or whether the Jesus we have learned about is really accurate and historical or mythical. We have endless complicated tracts on fine technical issues, but we don't explore Jesus' way to happiness and peace, or try to understand his feelings about God and creation of how he views our relationship with God, or his attitude toward human weakness. Understanding these things could help us immensely in our own search for inner peace and a meaning to life. — Joseph Girzone

I don't think I'm complicated at all. I'm not political, and I'm not trying to be diplomatic. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, and I don't say bad things about people. There is no agenda. There's no trying to fool somebody. — Nick Saban

Being a 'potential mate' was something rather different and much more complicated. It was when two people had the potential to become like one person, knowing each other's moods and feelings in a way no one else could. Being aware of their presence in a crowded room was just one example. If they were sad or angry, their mate would sense it to a point of feeling the emotion themselves. — A.Z. Green

What feminism did was make clear for me how much I longed for clarity. I got married twice, each time in a fog. I had so many complicated feelings I couldn't understand. — Vivian Gornick

Addiction to alcohol is also a neurological phenomenon, the result of a complex set of molecular alterations that take place in the brain when it's excessively and repeatedly exposed to the drug. The science of addiction is complicated, but the basic idea is fairly straightforward: alcohol appears to wreak havoc on the brain's natural systems of craving and reward, compromising the functioning of the various neurotransmitters and proteins that create feelings of well-being. — Caroline Knapp

Sometimes, I think our lifestyle has become the victim of a "World of Kinkcraft" gamer mentality, where people just want to download a cheat sheet or a step-by-step walk-through. Many newcomers yearn to "learn the rules" of the lifestyle as quickly as possible, so they can get right to "winning the game." These are relationships, people. Real BDSM relationships, involving real people with real feelings, living really complicated lives. If this was easy, everyone would be doing it. Stop looking for shortcuts and easy answers. — Michael Makai

I wouldn't say I'm stuck in my adolescence, but I think, like a lot of people, I carry my teen years with me. I feel really in touch with those feelings, and how intense and complicated life seems in those years. — Sara Zarr

My heart was crazy now; it's too complicated to know what it was beating for, and how much of it was him and how much of it was the hunting - I think I cared about the deer that got shot - but it didn't matter then. Something was there and its source was irrelevant. It was so easy to feel nothing, all the time, and I held on as hard as I could, because the worst thing, I thought, now, would be for it to go away. — Patrick Somerville

We are not very pleased when we are forced to accept a mathematical truth by virtue of a complicated chain of formal conclusions and computations, which we traverse blindly, link by link, feeling our way by touch. We want first an overview of the aim and of the road; we want to understand the idea of the proof, the deeper context. — Hermann Weyl

Just always be honest about your feelings. If everyone did that then the world would be a much simpler place. — Kiki Archer

I'm happy to not know what I think about stuff; I'm happy to change my mind. But it's relatively recently that I've been able to apply that to feelings. I used to like to know what I felt. I didn't want those feelings to be complicated or muddled or clashing. — Marlon James

Complicated feelings are fertile soil for creative ideas. — Kelly Sue DeConnick

When I was a child, I did always feel that people were hiding things, and that they weren't expressing their true feelings. When adults are too complicated, and cover their emotions with layers of well-intentioned subterfuge, the child isn't seeing reality clearly enough and gets upset. — Wallace Shawn

If someone feels that they're abandoned, there are always complicated feelings. There are always reasons for why people do the things that they do. — Maurissa Tancharoen

There occurred within a causal radius of Brandon Station one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause. In the soul of the great blazing sun there were complicated superhuman vibrations [connected] ... with the feelings of a few intellectual sages who had enough imagination to recognise the conscious personality of this fiery orb as it flung far and wide its life-giving magnetic forces. Roaring, cresting, heaving, gathering, mounting, advancing, receding, the enormous fire-thoughts of this huge luminary surged relentlessly to and fro, evoking a turbulent aura of psychic activity. — John Cowper Powys

I consider the differences between man and animals in propensities, feelings, and intellectual faculties, to be the result of the same cause as that which we assign for the variations in other functions, viz. difference of organization; and that the superiority of man in rational endowments is not greater than the more exquisite, complicated, and perfectly developed structure of his brain, and particularly of his ample cerebral hemispheres, to which the rest of the animal kingdom offers no parallel, nor even any near approximation, is sufficient to account for. — Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet

Watch the actors who are on a very high frequency, very alert to everything and very much in touch with their feelings -- simple. Acting should be economical and simple. It's not complicated. So many actors make it complicated, fill it with screaming, yelling, crying, a lot of emotion but no real inner action, no real focus. Actors who have good technique are pursuing a very simple objective. They know what they're listening for, they know what they're looking for. They know what the obstacles are that stand in the way and what they're doing to get what they want. They allow themselves to respond right off their partner, spontaneously.

Acting is not difficult. It's simply a matter of defining the action. — Michael Beckett

In order to write a memoir, I've sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I've waited - sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair - for the story under pressure of concealment to reveal itself to me. I've been doing this work long enough to know that our feelings - that vast range of fear, joy, grief, sorrow, rage, you name it - are incoherent in the immediacy of the moment. It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters — Dani Shapiro

You mean machines are like humans?"
I shook my head. "No, not like humans. With machines the feeling is, well, more finite. It doesn't go any further.
With humans it's different. The feeling is always changing. Like if you love somebody, the love is always shifting or wavering. It's always questioning or inflating or disappearing or denying or hurting. And the thing is, you can't do anything about it, you can't control it. With my Subaru, it's not so complicated. — Haruki Murakami

A book's a strange thing. It's ideas, feelings. It's fragile and complicated. You can't make them like refrigerators or cars. — Etienne Davodeau