Quotes & Sayings About Feeling Out Of Place

In a moment a world will lose its focus and become a different place. They say that blind people have been struck by their affliction without warning, and that Helen Keller found language and light in a word. For me, I suddenly knew, viscerally at least, a number of things about my town that I'd only ever suspected. The dog was a girl. The dog was a native girl. I dug her out of the snow with more care than I'd ever lifted a porcupine or a snapping rat, and feeling that she was still somewhat warm, that her wrappings of rags had protected her from the cold of a Manitoba winter, I placed my jacket around her and covered her head with my hat. Then I set a pace back to the farm that left a taste of blood in my mouth, freezing my lungs by running at minus thirty. — Barry Pomeroy

When he stood up, we suddenly turned dead-still. It was the way he held his head. He was tall and slim - and I remember thinking that any two of us could have broken his neck without trouble - but what we all felt was fear. He stood like a man who knew that he was right. 'I will put an end to this, once and for all,' he said. His voice was clear and without any feeling. That was all he said and started to walk out. He walked down the length of the place, in the white light, not hurrying and not noticing any of us. Nobody moved to stop him. Gerald Starnes cried suddenly after him, 'How?' He turned and answered, 'I will stop the motor of the world.' Then he walked out. We never saw him again. We never heard what became of him. — Ayn Rand

If you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the 'slow hunch.' We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them." Solving the problem means being in the right place at the right time - available to the propitious moment, the kairos. Perhaps counterintuitively, protecting what is left of this flow from the pressing obligation of new choices gives us a leg up on innovation. — Douglas Rushkoff

It was the people, the interconnection, everyone relying on everyone else, the closeness. The villages are all dying now, small-town America is dying, and the only place where the same feeling exists now is here, in the city, millions of people all breathing the same air. This, here, now, is more utopia than utopia, more than your pretty little house out in the middle of the forest with only woodchucks for neighbors. Can't you see? All of we kids are here, almost all of the kids from Arcadia, are here in the city. We've gone urban because we're all looking for what we lost. This is the only place that approximates it. The closeness. The connection. — Lauren Groff

Showmen's Rest was truly something to behold. Throughout the entire yard, statues and carvings of elephants, clowns, and tight-rope walkers danced on the gray and white surfaces of tombstones and grave-markers. For the first time, Michael got the feeling that the men and women who'd been buried there were probably really happy with their final resting place. It was a touching tribute, one that honored their passion in life and that had been constructed out of love and respect. — Jacqueline E. Smith

I think my sound differentiates me from everyone else. I'm able to dip and dabble in other genres, without feeling out of place. Im not confined to one sound. — Iceberg Slim

The third person. There was no sign of this happiness on the outside, she knew. She was bored by this happiness that seemed out of place, impatient to get rid of it. The feeling was less pleasurable than she had imagined it might have been, less well-defined, and when she felt along its strings she found it was not easily traced or attached to the objects she thought it might have been attached to. Perhaps it was not attached to anything at all. — Joanna Walsh

And one of the things she had learned early in her life
was that if you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn
more about it. If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and
in many ways that was worse than finding out you were wrong in the first place. Because if you
were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and
wondering what might have been — Nicholas Sparks

The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days. — Ernest Hemingway,

Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn't. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday world about her, the world of the square, of trees, of people walking by, with a curious glow, a chiaroscuro which made everything precious. It was the feeling, she imagined, that one had when one vouchsafed a vision. Everything is changed, becomes more blessed, making the humblest of surroundings a holy place. — Alexander McCall Smith

A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Then I sit down, work at it, because now I have a convincing feeling about what that place wants to be, you see? And it's not just me. Me and my talent comes in taking that consensus and then making something wonderful out of it - a work of art. — Lawrence Halprin

We've all had the experience of you pick up a book, you can't get into it, you can't concentrate.Then one day you pick up the same book and you don't hear the phone ring. You're totally absorbed. Same thing I have to do every day. When you get into that special place of unconsciousness - you get it listening to great music or seeing a great movie - it just takes you out of yourself, out of this whole world. There's no feeling quite like it. — T.C. Boyle

The men's tanned faces, the faces of the women, bright with cosmetics, all suddenly appeared similar, as though wearing identical masks; hard, smiling, decorative, devoid of feeling. Not one of the seemed capable of expressing affection or pity or any of the softer emotions. They frightened her, these gay, hard, animated, worldly masks; she would always be a stranger among them, lost, ill-at-ease, out of place. — Anna Kavan

At times, feeling the wind on my brow, I went numb with horror. In my imagination I saw armies of ants and cockroaches calling to one another and scurrying toward my head, to some place under the top of my skull, where they would build new nests. There they would proliferate and eat out my thoughts, one after another, until I would become as empty as the shell of a pumpkin from which all the fruit has been scraped out. — Jerzy Kosinski

I definitely understand not entirely fitting in. I think everyone has their own version of feeling out of place and I think one of the great things we have the ability to do is to know it's all right. It's OK to have that awkward phase. — Rumer Willis

Darcy didn't want this interruption to last only a year. She wanted to see how long she could stretch this feeling out. To be dizzy with words again, like in that glorious week at the end of last November when everything had fallen into place. Darcy wanted that feeling not just for a year. She wanted it forever. — Scott Westerfeld

I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA. — Jodi Picoult

Was I still myself? If so, who was I? I wasn't really interested in knowing that. It had no sort of importance for me anymore. Some moorings had broken, some taboos had fallen, and a world of spells and anathemas was springing up from their ruins. What was terrifying about this whole affair was the ease with which I passed from one universe to another without feeling out of place. Such a smooth transition. I had gone to bed a docile, courteous boy, and I'd awakened with an inextinguishable rage lodged in my very flesh. I carried my hatred like a second nature; it was my armor and my shirt of Nessus, my pedestal and my stake; it was all that remained to me in this false, unjust, arid, and cruel life. — Yasmina Khadra

I leaned back on my elbows and basked in the warming spring sun. There was a curious peace in this day, a sense of things working quietly in their proper courses, nothing minding the upsets and turmoils of human concerns. Perhaps it was the peace that one always finds outdoors, far enough away from buildings and clatter. Maybe it was the result of gardening, that quiet sense of pleasure in touching growing things, the satisfaction of helping them thrive. Perhaps just the relief of finally having found work to do, rather than rattling around the castle feeling out of place, conspicuous as an inkblot on parchment. — Diana Gabaldon

Of this crisis in my life, I remember chiefly a sense of tremendous inevitability, a feeling that fate was settling its own problems, and too much reflection would be out of place. — Anthony Powell

From the moment I bought my ticket, I had a premonition I wasn't returning to New York anytime soon.
You Know, this happens a lot to Russians. The Soviet Union is gone, and the borders are as free and passable as they've ever been. And yet, when a Russian moves between the two universes, this feeling of finality persists, the logical impossibility of a place like Russia existing alongside the civilized world, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sharing the same atmosphere with, say, Vladivostok. It was like those mathematical concepts I could never understand in high school: if, then. If Russia exists, then the West is a mirage; conversely, if Russia does not exist, then and only then is the West real and tangible. No wonder young people talk about "going beyond the cordon" when they talk of emigrating, as if Russia were ringed by a vast cordon sanitaire. Either you stay in the leper colony or you get out into the wider world and maybe try to spread your disease to others. — Gary Shteyngart

Doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. — Ernest Becker

Tristran sat at the top of the spire of cloud and wondered why none of the heroes of the penny dreadfuls he used to read so avidly were ever hungry. His stomach rumbled, and his hand hurt him so.

Adventures are all very well in their place, he thought, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

Still, he was alive, and the wind was in his hair, and the cloud was scudding through the sky like a galleon at full sail. Looking out over the world from above, he could never remember feeling so alive as he did at that moment. There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.

He understood that he was, in some way, above his problems, just as he was above the world. — Neil Gaiman

Have you ever watched a baby learning to walk? He totters, arms stretched out to balance himself. He wobbles - and falls, perhaps bumps his nose. Then he puts the palms of his little hands flat on the floor, hikes his rear end up, looks around to see if anybody is watching him. If nobody is, usually he doesn't bother to cry, just precariously balances himself - and tries again. Well, the baby can teach us. What you've undertaken ... isn't a state of perfection to be arrived at all of the sudden. It's a WALK, and a walk isn't static but ever-changing. We Friends say that all discouragement is from an evil source and can only end in more evil. Wallowing in self-condemnation or feeling sorry for yourself is worse than falling on your face in the first place ... So thee is human. — Catherine Marshall

In its essence, the transitional stage of Shifting is when we wonder if maybe there is much more to the spiritual life than we've ever been taught, if the wild ways of Jesus are even really possible, or if we could possibly find life outside of going to church. We start dreaming of a place or way we could use our creativity and gifts without being controlled by the church or someone else's leadership. We long to engage in more meaningful relationships instead of superficial ones. We want to spend time hanging out with our neighbors instead of only church people (and without any kind of evangelism agenda). While desires look different for each of us, Shifting is about no longer feeling comfortable in our spiritual skin. — Kathy Escobar

You're a watchful guy. you know where that comes from?" I shook my head. "It comes from feeling out of place," he said. "Believe me. I know. — Mohsin Hamid

Laughter, when out of place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of feeling, may be the most terrible modulation of the human voice. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

What we colloquially call 'feeling bored' is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place. — Alain De Botton

I think the therapists around this place think that if you know yourself, then somehow you'll be better and healthier and you'll be able to leave this place and live out your days as a happy and loving human being. Happy. Loving. I hate those words. I'm supposed to like them. I'm supposed to want them. I don't. Don't like them, don't want them. This is the way I see it: if you get to know yourself really well, you might discover that deep down inside you're just a dirty, disgusting, and selfish piece of shit. What if my heart is all rotted out and corrupted? What about that? What am I supposed to do with that information? Just tell me that. Most of the time I get the feeling that I'm just an animal disguised as an eighteen-year-old guy. At least I'm hoping that maybe deep down inside I'm a coyote. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

I came here because it's pine-dark and the ocean is wild. The kind of quiet-noise you need when there's too much going on in your head. Like the water and the woods are doing all the feeling, and I can hang out, quiet as a headstone, in a between place. A blank I can bear. — Amy McNamara

A scream is a sound we make that is born of intense feeling. A scream of fear, of being startled, is often high-pitched. It may be short or prolonged. A scream may also accompany delight or amusement, though often that is more of a squeal. And a scream of sorrow or rage ... well, that is an entirely different thing. That comes from a darker place, from the depths of our souls, and when we scream in those times, because we are sad or angry, there is a terrible knowledge that accompanies it, that we are giving voice to our emotions, to what is simply too big for our hearts to contain.
And as Li Wei cries out, I know Feng Ji is right. It is his heart I am hearing, a way of expressing what he feels over his father's loss that is both primal and beautiful, and it comes from his soul and reaches something within mine. It is the sound my own heart made when my parents died, only I didn't know it until now. — Richelle Mead

As an adult I have often known that peculiar legacy time brings to the traveler: the longing to seek out a place a second time, to find deliberately what we stumbled on once before, to recapture the feeling of discovery. Sometimes we search out again even a place that was not remarkable itself - we look for it simply because we remember it. If we do find it, of course, everything is different. The rough-hewn door is still there, but it's much smaller; the day is cloudy instead of brilliant; it's spring instead of autumn; we're alone instead of with three friends. Or worse, with three friends instead of alone. — Elizabeth Kostova

Christ's place indeed is with the poets. His whole conception of Humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be realised by it. What God was to the pantheist, man was to Him. He was the first to conceive the divided races as a unity. Before his time there had been gods and men, and, feeling through the mysticism of sympathy that in himself each had been made incarnate, he calls himself the Son of the one or the Son of the other, according to his mood. More than any one else in history he wakes in us that temper of wonder to which romance always appeals. — Oscar Wilde

It's nice to hear that I'm not completely alone in feeling out of place."
"That's something you should know about us Silvers. We're always alone. In here, and here," he says, pointing between his head and his heart.
"It keeps you strong. — Victoria Aveyard

I had never deserved to be forgiven in the first place when I aas converted. I could do nothing to merit God's favour, His grace, His love. If all I had ever known was unmerited and undeserved grace, how could I then forfeit that which I never earned?... Was I too proud, in some strange, inverted way to humble myself to accept an unmerited forgiveness? I know that it was all of grace, yet my inner being wanted the right to do something to merit it. I was trying to work out my own salvation, to earn God's forgiveness, to prove the sincerity of my repentance...At last I knew that it was true. It was not based on my feeling or on my emotions. It was not dependent on my faith or my obedience. In no way could I merit or deserve it. He loved me. He knew me through and through, better than I knew myself, and yet still, He loved me. Christ died on Calvary to tell me that. Christ lives in Heaven, an unceasing intercessor on my behalf to make that love real to me in my experience. — Helen Roseveare

The real trick to producing great work isn't to find ways to eliminate the edgy, nervous feeling that you might be swimming out of your depth. Instead, it's to remember that everyone else is feeling it, too. We're all in deep water. Which is fine: it's by far the most exciting place to be. — Oliver Burkeman

Ten months ago, I would have sat beside them, drinking beer and fitting in, and writing witty commentary in my head: She puts the words out there on purpose, like a lawyer trying to lead the jury. "Objection, Miss Monk." "So sorry. Please disregard." But it's too late because the jury has heard the words and latched onto them - if he likes her, she must like him in return. ... But now I stand there, feeling dull and out of place and wondering how I was ever friends with Amanda to begin with. The air is too close. — Jennifer Niven

And God said: Let there be light, and there was light. Lena opened her eyes, feeling as if someone had been reading this verse out loud in the room. She looked around. Another morning dawned, and the sky glowed. Why did God say the word light out loud? Wasn't it enough for him just to think of light for there to be light? And did he summon the light to one specific place? Or only to some places? Perhaps he summoned the light everywhere. Her eyes followed the sun's beams that poured through the shutter slats, creating luminous flecks of gold that sparkled against the cabinet across from her. Tiny motes floated in the light and disappeared in the dark. Who did God created the light for? — Gala.J

It is a part of our office to stand uncloaked, masked, sword bared, upon the scaffold for a long time before the client is brought out. Some say this is to symbolize the unsleeping omnipresence of justice, but I believe the real reason is to give the crowd a focus, and the feeling that something is about to take place. A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart. Before the Hall of Justice, a ring of dimarchi surrounded the scaffold with their lances, and the pistol their officer carried could, I suppose, have killed fifty or sixty before someone could snatch it from him and knock him to the cobblestones to die. Still it is better to have a focus, and some open symbol of power.
Wolfe, Gene (1994-10-15). Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' (p. 184). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition. — Gene Wolfe

As it turned out, home wasn't a certain place; home as a feeling from the ones for whom you cared most, a feeling of peace that calmed the wildfires of your soul. — Brittainy C. Cherry

something happened to me. God heard my deep cries of anguish. A feeling of lightness flowed over me, and I knew a change of heart had taken place. I felt different. I was different. At last I stood up, placed the Bible on the edge of the tub, and went to the sink. I washed my face and hands, straightened my clothes. I walked out of the bathroom a changed young man. "My temper will never control me again," I told myself. "Never again. I'm free." And since that day, since those long hours wrestling with myself and crying to God for help, I have never had a problem with my temper. That — Ben Carson

It was one of those perfect nights, listening to the waves crash, feeling the warm summer breeze, watching the sun set over the ocean as the moon rose up in the sky. I looked out over the cliffs and I thought about the explorers who had sailed from places like this, what they'd accomplished, mapping the unknown world, charting our place in the universe. How many times had they failed and fallen down only to get back up and try again? How many times had they sailed out on an impossible voyage and made a successful return home? I sat there with Carola looking out over the endless horizon. It was strange, but I felt like everything was going to be okay. The end of my story was not yet written, and I still had the chance to make it extraordinary. — Mike Massimino

I don't want to be like, yes, I think the American answer is always stupid, or I think it's always the right answer. So I'm in this weird place there. I'm feeling it out. Cambodia is going through an enormous amount of change right now. Daily. — Anne Elizabeth Moore

There was almost a fairy quality to this place, he thought. The far look and the clear air and the feeling of detachment that touched almost on greatness of the spirit. As if this were a special place, one of those special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as lucky if he ever found it, for there were those who sought and never found it. And worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it. — Clifford D. Simak

The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to protect, contain, support and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling - that is the supreme psychic nourishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight. It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit. The body is the launcher of those experiences. Without body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, there would be no sense of lifting, no sense of height, weightlessness. All that comes from the body. The body is the rocket launcher. In its nose capsule, the soul looks out the window into the mysterious starry night and is dazzled. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When Christian pushes into the brick wall of the building catty-corner to the rear of BB&B - first left on the Dark Zone side - and disappears, I melt down in a fit of the giggles. I toss a rock at the spot where he vanished. It bounces off the brick and clatters to the cobblestone. I'm feeling twenty shades of Harry Potter's train station, especially when he pokes his head out of the wall and says impatiently, Come on, lass. This is hardly my favorite place to be. — Karen Marie Moning

Basically, I have one feeling ... the desire to get out of here. And any other feelings I have come from trying to analyze, you know, why I want to go away ... See, I always feel uncomfortable and I just want to ... walk out of the room. It's not going to any other place or any other sensation, or anything like that, it's just to get out of 'here'. — Richard Hell

I love that place where you get in running where you're just never out of breath and you just feel like you could go forever. I love that. I love feeling strong. — Ann Bancroft

The theory of positivity teaches us to, "always look on the bright side" and to, "point out the bright side to others". However, any highly empathic individual will know, that this mindset alienates us from other people. What connects us with other people is the ability to identify with what they are feeling and thinking, regardless of whether or not we've actually been in their place before. If you want to point someone out to the light, first you need to get into their dark cave with them, light a candle, and say, "Hey, I'm here with you and look, remember what the light feels like?" That's the kind of positivity that actually bears real change in people, in the world. — C. JoyBell C.

It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten years ago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she must be in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays. — Virginia Woolf

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SELF-LOVE AND NARCISSISM? On the surface, the story of Narcissus seems to bear out our fears that to love the self means that we become SELFISH and develop an arrogant disregard for the needs and feelings of OTHERS. But if we look at Narcissus a little more closely, we see that it isn't HIMSELF that he loves but his REFLECTED self. He is actually incapable of love in any of its PURE forms, most of all, the LOVE of SELF. In fact, it is a sense of feeling so miserably INFERIOR and DEPENDENT on others? approval that drives narcissistic behaviour in the first place. — Bev Aisbett

finding the time to practice takes a little effort and thought. For many of us, already feeling maxed out in terms of time constraints, being told that we need to set aside more time five days a week to do something else is in itself stressful. As you make your wellness and wholeness a priority, you will find it becomes easier to protect your practice by creating a special place and time in which to work on yourself. — Beryl Bender Birch

Around them the stubbled land was marked off by plaques and signs that explained to visitors what had happened here on a long-ago July day not unlike this one. But Peter already knew all they said and more. He looked around at the people with their noses tucked in brochures and guidebooks, and those trailing, sheeplike, after tour guides and park employees. He was used to feeling somewhat out of place most everywhere he went
at school or the barbershop, even at home, but here, where he knew everything, all the names and dates and facts, he somehow seemed to fit, and the knowledge of this welled up inside him. It was like he'd been born a blue flower in a field full of red ones and had only now been plunked down in a meadow so blue it might as well have been the ocean. — Jennifer E. Smith

If I could fall in love with a girl, it'd be her. Those ifs are dangerous. You try them on in your head like dresses, so easy to slide in and out of. If I kissed girls, I'd kiss her. If we kissed, it'd go like this. At some point I dropped the if like a slip and just wore the feeling, nothing between it and my skin. When I kiss her. When it happens. All of it took place in my head, in silence, locked tight in skull bone and the frantic synaptic whispers between neurons, no clues popping out except the passive-aggressive haircut, the incriminating poem.
That's the problem with writers. Too much imagination.
The greater part of me knew it couldn't be real, but the hopeful part, which is more concentrated and condensed, rich in nine essential delusions, thought: It's not all in your head. — Leah Raeder

The moment Tess walked out the door with Liam, Will finally understood what he was sacrificing. If there was no child involved, this conversation wouldn't be taking place. He loved Tess, presumably he did, but right now he was in love with Felicity, and everyone knew which was the more powerful feeling. It wasn't a fair fight. It was why marriages fell apart. It was why, if you valued your marriage, you kept a barricade around yourself and your feelings and your thoughts. You didn't let your eyes linger. You didn't stay for the second drink. You kept the flirting safe. You just didn't go there. At some point Will had made a choice to look at Felicity with the eyes of a single man. That was the moment he had betrayed Tess. — Liane Moriarty

Being a kid, as all kids do, you feel out of place or like kind of a freak. You wake up feeling like your head got put onto someone else's body that day. — John Hawkes

There's nothing in this courtyard, after all, that wasn't here in 1977; maybe it's not this year but that one, and everything that follows is still to come ... For if the evidence points to anything, it's that there is no one unitary City. Or if there is, it's the sum of thousands of variations, all jockeying for the same spot. This may be wishful thinking; still, I can't help imagining that the points of contact between this place and my own lost city healed incompletely, left the scars I'm feeling for when I send my head up the fire escapes and toward the blue square of freedom beyond. And you out there: Aren't you somehow right here with me? I mean, who doesn't still dream of a world other than this one? Who among us--if it means letting go of the insanity, the mystery, the totally useless beauty of the million once-possible New Yorks--is ready even now to give up hope? — Garth Risk Hallberg

Concepts are related to the senses; and, when feeling takes place, wisdom is shut out. — Huangbo Xiyun

The tight, throbbing feeling in my throat made me want to start sobbing, to break down, right there on an unfamiliar corner in front of a house just like my own. Everything seemed so out of control, as if even running the streets wouldn't save me. I wondered if this was how she felt running wild at night, this lost, loose feeling that no consequence could be so harmful as the sense of staying where you were, or of being who you are. I wanted to be somewhere else, out of the range of my mother's voice and ears, of Ashley's pouty looks, of the News Channel 5 viewing area. A place where the sight of my sobbing would tie me to no one and no one to me. — Sarah Dessen

Perhaps one may be out late, and had got separated from one's companions. Oh horrors! Suddenly one starts and trembles as one seems to see a strange-looking being peering from out of the darkness of a hollow tree, while all the while the wind is moaning and rattling and howling through the forest - moaning with a hungry sound as it strips the leaves from the bare boughs, and whirls them into the air. High over the tree-tops, in a widespread, trailing, noisy crew, there fly, with resounding cries, flocks of birds which seem to darken and overlay the very heavens. Then a strange feeling comes over one, until one seems to hear the voice of some one whispering: "Run, run, little child! Do not be out late, for this place will soon have become dreadful! Run, little child! Run!" And at the words terror will possess one's soul, and one will rush and rush until one's breath is spent - until, panting, one has reached home. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.
In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center: there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure. — Mark Doty

I think in L.A., in terms of the music scene, it's a really strange place. It's really hard to get the feeling that something's happening, or the feeling that something can make it out of there. — Aleksa Palladino

We learned this week that Mitt Romney is building a car elevator in his house. An elevator for your cars. I get the feeling this guy wants to be president so he has a place to live while he's remodeling his beach house ... I'm not worried that this guy is out of touch. I'm worried he's Batman. I could see Mitt as Batman. He hears about a robbery, he changes into the magic underwear, he rushes to the crime scene, and he helps the crooks manage their new money. — Bill Maher

Some Hindus have an elephant to show.
No one here has ever seen an elephant.
They bring it at night to a dark room.
One by one, we go in the dark and come out
saying how we experience the animal.
One of us happens to touch the trunk.
A water-pipe kind of creature.
Another, the ear. A strong, always moving
back and forth, fan-animal. Another, the leg.
I find it still, like a column on a temple.
Another touches the curve back.
A leathery throne. Another, the cleverest,
feels the tusk. A rounded sword made of porcelain.
He is proud of his description.
Each of us touches one place
and understands the whole in that way.
The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark
are how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.
If each of us held a candle there,
and if we went in together, we could see it. — Rumi

I'd been to New York enough to know that it wasn't always easy to find a place to walk a dog in the middle of Manhattan, so I headed to the hotel's bell stand to look for some guidance. "Where can I find some grass around here?" I asked. The porter paused for a second, as he seemed to size me up. Then he replied: "Hey man, you're in the middle of Times Square. You can buy it from just about anyone out there." That was pretty funny. Dakota, I've a feeling we're not in Plano anymore, I thought. — Mike Lingenfelter

As his boots walked towards the old station, he felt as though he were hallucinating. Scary apprehension increased the beat of his heart and the sweat upon his forehead was cold. The reality of where he stood created a sinking feeling inside of him.
An old man everyone called Uncle Tucker once owned this place. His sole existence behind the counter all of the time, day and night. He could have been a creature out of a fairy tale, with his long white beard and equally long white hair. Merlin. The overalls and the ball cap perched upon his head, along with the half-smoked cigar with an endless burning orb positioned in his mouth. It made him a fixture in time. He wondered if Tucker would still be alive. Tucker with his endless stories of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and flower children. A man that never left a country thousands of miles away where bicycles filled the capital. A man who never left those fields where killing occurred. — Jaime Allison Parker

And then suddenly I hear his footsteps approaching. He's behind me, thirty feet away, at a guess.
No wonder I couldn't see him.
I should turn. Right now I should turn. This is the moment that it would be natural to swivel round
and greet him. Call out a hello; wave my phone in the air.
But my feet are rooted to the spot. I can't bring myself to move. Because as soon as I do, it will be
time to be polite and matter-of-fact and back to normal. And I can't bear that. I want to stay here. In
the place where we can say anything to each other. In the magic spell.
Sam pauses, right behind me. There's an unbearable fragile beat as I wait for him to shatter the quiet. But it's as though he feels the same way. He says nothing. All I can hear is the gentle sound
of his breathing. Slowly, his arms wrap round me from behind. I close my eyes and lean back
against his chest, feeling unreal. — Sophie Kinsella

I've gone through terrible periods of depression. But, at the core of my being, there's a strange, out-of-place optimist. Despite what I'm feeling, I'm always able to get up and do my job. Which means the world to me. — Jenny Lewis

For it is the fate of every myth to creep by degrees into the narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some later generation as a unique fact with historical claims ... this is the way in which religions are wont to die out: under the stern, intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical premises of a religion are systematized as a sum total of historical events; one begins apprehensively to defend the credibility of the myths, while at the same time one opposes any continuation of their vitality and growth; the feeling for myth perishes, and its place is taken by the claim of religion to historical foundations. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Was it really that fucking great to be gay? Ever since he got too fucked up to drive home and he'd crashed at Day and God's place after their cookout this summer. Green was in Miami testifying in a Federal case, so he didn't have his usual designated driver. Shit. He'd heard his lieutenants going at it in the middle of the night. It was so loud and violent, but wildly erotic. He didn't know if they forgot he was downstairs or if they just didn't give a fuck. He remembered being hard as goddamn stone lying there, and feeling like a pervert for listening. But since then, he hadn't been able to get the sounds out of his head. The sounds of furious passion and uninhibited ecstasy. The way God roared his lover's name when he ca - " "Time — A.E. Via

No matter how physically faint, a photograph involuntarily whisper of something exquisitely carnal. The weeks, the years, whatever stretches of time separating our present from the photographs retire into the transparence of the shot and seem erased by it. We almost have to shake ourselves to overcome the feeling that we peer out at the other place, in that different age. Yet we are always aware of this illusory dislocation, for such is the ambiguity, in principle, that seduces us over and over again in the photographic experience. — Max Kozloff

At some point you cannot be the kid in the glass bubble in this world. You might've heard throughout your grade school and high school years that it was a safe, nice, warm, fair, feeling place ... but it can get brutal when it gets competitive. Especially when you succeed. Watch the detractors come out of the walls at that point. — Dennis Miller

You know that feeling, when you've had the worst day of your life and it seems like the universe is out to get you? And then you get home and as soon as you walk through the door it's like you're shutting all of that out? The heavens smile on you and you get all cozy in the tub or bed or whatever and all that bad stuff just melts away? 'Cause you're in your safe place? — Caisey Quinn

Comedy crowds - we always want to come out and ask you, 'How you feeling?' We always say that, 'By a round of applause, how do you feel?' Right? 'By a round of applause, how you feeling?' It's the only place in the world that you judge how you're feeling by a round of applause ... There's never like a car accident, people all over the ground, people running over - 'Ma'am! Ma'am! By a round of applause, how do you feel? By a round of applause - she's not clapping! — Dane Cook

Self-reflection or autognosis reveals that what is given in consciousness is, first and foremost, integral connectedness and organic unity of all thinking, feeling, and desiring. At the same time, self-reflection reveals that this connected unity is the ultimate reality that can be reached. "Consciousness cannot go behind itself." Whatever we propose to think forms part of this organic unity of our mind and is a result or consequence of it. There is no means of jumping beyond consciousness, and any attempt to explain with the help of any other imaginary system the radical connectedness in which we live and that is our mind would be absurd. Our mind is the very presupposition of all explanation. For to explain a phenomenon means, in the last instance, to point out its place and its part within the living economy of consciousness, and to determine the "meaning" it has in the original source of all meaning: life. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I quickly imagined that I could reach my hand into my chest, yank out that awful feeling, place it on an invisibl ecloud of air right in front of me, then push it away. Push it away — Jennifer Castle

If you have ever come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees rising far above their usual height and blocking the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your wonder at the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you a sense of the divine (numen). Or, if a cave made by the deep erosion of rocks supports a mountain with its arch, a place not made by hands but hollowed out by natural causes into spaciousness, then your mind will be aroused by a feeling of religious awe (religio). We venerate the sources of mighty rivers, we build an altar where a great stream suddenly bursts forth from a hidden source, we worship hot springs, and we deem lakes sacred because of their darkness or immeasurable depth. (Seneca the Younger, Letters 41.3) — Valerie M. Warrior

All my life, I have been searching for a home," the drow said quietly. "All my life, I have been wanting more than that which was offered to me, more than Menzoberranzan, more than friends who stood beside me out of personal gain. I always thought home would be a place, and indeed it is, but not in any physical sense. It is a place in here," Drizzt said, putting a hand to his heart and turning back to look upon his companions. "It is a feeling given by true friends.
I know this now, and know that I am home."
"But ye're off to Carradoon," Cattie-brie said softly.
"And so're we!" Bruenor bellowed.
Drizzt smiled at them, laughed aloud. "If circumstances will not allow me to remain at home," the ranger said firmly, "then I will simply take my home with me! — R.A. Salvatore

He knows as well as I do what the Why is. It's everything changing when I was ten. It's the bullying and the fear. So much fear of everything, but mostly death. Sudden, out-of-the-blue death. It's also me being terrified of life. It's the giant emptiness in my chest. It's touching my face or my skin and feeling nothing. This is the Why of me staying home in the first place. And the Why of me eating. And the Why of me ending up here. But that doesn't mean I want to die. — Jennifer Niven

She had thought she'd already reached her capacity for pain and had no room inside her for more. But she remembered having told Archer once that you could not measure love on a scale of degrees, and now she understood that it was the same with pain. Pain might escalate upwards, and, just when you'd thought you'd reached your limit, begin to spread sideways, and spill out, and touch other people, and mix with their pain. And grow larger, but somehow less oppressive. She had thought herself trapped in a place outside the ordinary feeling lives of other people; she had not noticed how many other people were trapped in that place with her. — Kristin Cashore

Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets, college kids were planning their next ski trip and discussing the new Police album. We could have been in any city in Japan. Transplant this coffee shop scene to Yokohama or Fukuoka and nothing would seem out of place. In spite of which
or, rather, all the more because
here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here.
Of course, by the same token, I couldn't really say I belonged to Tokyo and its coffee shops. But I had never felt this loneliness there. I could drink my coffee, read my book, pass the time of day without any special thought, all because I was part of the regular scenery. Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I'd come to reclaim myself. — Haruki Murakami

Claire elbowed him. 'You must be feeling better.'
'Seems like it, doesn't it?'
That, she thought with a sudden rush of disquiet, was not an answer. It was an evasion. 'Are you feeling better?'
'If by better you mean much more aware than I ought to be of the fact that there are freaking vampires all over the place, then yes, much better. But I'm dealing with it.'
'If you can't, will you let me know?'
'Sure thing. I'll let out a howl.'
'Not funny.'
'Well, in my defense, it wasn't really meant to be. I mean, I might literally howl. — Rachel Caine

Repentance, as a natural feeling, is a common duty deserving no great praise: indeed, it is so generally mingled with a selfish fear of punishment, that the kindliest estimate makes but little of it. Had not Jesus interposed and wrought out a wealth of merit, our tears of repentance would have been so much water spilled upon the ground. Jesus is exalted on high, that through the virtue of His intercession repentance may have a place before God. In this respect He gives us repentance, because He puts repentance into a position of acceptance, which otherwise it could never have occupied. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

When you are insulted by someone or humiliated, guard against angry thoughts, lest they arouse a feeling of irritation, and so cut you off from love and place you in the realm of hatred. You should know that you have been greatly benefited when you have suffered deeply because of some insult or indignity; for by means of the indignity self-esteem has been driven out of you. — Maximus The Confessor

I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that -- if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world. — Naomi Shihab Nye

It has been fashionable in some psychiatric and lay circles to blame the mother for whatever goes wrong in development. [...]

If blame must be assessed it should be placed on the human condition which requires such prolonged dependence on one individual for development to take place. This makes the child extraordinarily vulnerable to the idiosyncrasies of that person (the mother). On the other hand, the prolonged dependence on this relationship also provides the potential for the richness of the human personality.

It is a mistake, in my judgment, in psychotherapy to encourage or side with the patient's hostility to the mother. The patient has to become aware of and express it in therapy in order to grow but whatever the source of this hostility is in the past -- be it an actual memory or a fantasy to rationalize a feeling state -- the problem is now the patient's responsibility and he must work it out. — James F. Masterson

Generally, I liked feeling able to connect with millions of women on a very deep level. It felt special that women especially would cut out my strip and place it on a refrigerator. — Cathy Guisewite

In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you don't look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries ... They have been killed in place of you - in your place. You don't think it out, not at the time, not in those terms, but you can't help but feel it, and go on feeling it. It's the close call you have to keep escaping from, the unending doubt that you have a right to your own life. It's the corruption suffered by everyone who lives on, that henceforth they must wonder at the reason and probe its justice. — Tobias Wolff

You're playing a role, but you're still feeling it. You can walk away from it after 'Cut,' but if you're playing a sad or mixed-up person, it's hard to stay in that place for these longish period of times. You kind of have to check out. — Nick Nolte

You have to have a place where you can gather your thoughts. Like people who pray. That is what is difficult here at the school. Peter says it is like glass tunnels.
...
It is already under way. It is the middle of a period, we are not where the plan says we should be, we have stepped out of the glass tunnel. The experiment is already under way. Something is happening to us, can you feel it? What is it? What's happening is that you are starting to become restless, you want to get back, you can feel time passing. That feeling is your chance, you can feel your way and learn something you would otherwise never have seen. Like when I came late on purpose. I stepped out of the tunnel I was used to walking along, I saw Biehl, and I noticed something ... He's scared too. — Peter Hoeg

How great inexperience and innocence is. On the authority of their parents they go to a place where they could meet their death; for the Zirder in flood is very dangerous and, given the ignorance of the children, can be incalculably dangerous. But they know nothing of death. Even if they speak its name, they do not know its essence and their aspiring life has no feeling for annihilation. If they were on the brink of death themselves, they would not know it and they would die before they found it out. — Adalbert Stifter

The sooner I get through my schedule, the sooner I'll be home."
He grinned. "And we can have makeup sex."
Now there was that naughty side peeking out. "But we didn't have a fight," she countered.
"We did have a trial separation," he suggested.
He had her there.
"Go." She motioned toward the door. "We'll have all the makeup sex you want. Tonight."
He backed toward the door. She couldn't help watching the way he moved. So sexy. So chock-full of male confidence.
"I'll be waiting at your place. I'll even have dinner waiting."
Before she could question that promise he turned around and strolled out the door.
Her gaze narrowed. He said he'd have it ready, he didn't say he'd cook it.
Elizabeth pressed her hand to her tummy and smiled at the feeling of complete happiness that rushed through her.
Now she could rightfully say that she really did have it all.
And Joe Hennessey had definitely been worth the wait. — Debra Webb

I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home. — G.K. Chesterton