Intense Emotion Quotes & Sayings

Our memory is enhanced by the emotion attending the event. The more intense the feelings the more accessible to the memory is the event. Few of us live lives so emotionally charged that we can truly, accurately retrieve all of it ... Often only our crisis events are preserved with strong emotions. For our own survival we can't forget them, and then we too easily forget the good stuff. — Robert Dykstra

Music has its own emotional embodiment. It carries an emotion with it. When you associate a lyric with the music, it's much easier; but when you're standing there completely dry in front of the camera with no musical background, just a fine-tuned, get-this-emotional-story across, it's a very, very intense kind of focus. — Debbie Harry

After six years of solitude, sharing a meal and conversation with someone was a pleasure. More than a pleasure, her hospitality and companionship were also affecting to a surprising extent, so that at times I was overcome by emotion so intense, I couldn't have spoken without revealing how profoundly I was moved. — Dean Koontz

Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don't like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which irritates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck. — Roger Zelazny

You know how some people were absolutely never children, but just came from a catalog fully grown, while other people you don't even have to squint to imagine them charging down the stairs on Christmas morning in superhero pajamas? Mik's the latter. It's not that he's "boyish," though I guess he is a little - but only a little - it's just that there's something direct and real and electric and pure that hasn't been lost, the intense, undiluted emotion of childhood. Most people lose it — Laini Taylor

Cultivate an appreciation and passion for books. I'm using passion in the fullest sense of the word: a deep, fervent emotion, a state of intense desire; an enthusiastic ardor for something or someone. — Cassandra King

Cress?"
"It's beautiful out there."
A hesitation, before, "Could you be more specific?"
"The sky is gorgeous, intense blue color." She pressed her fingers to the glass and traced the wavy hills on the horizon.
"Oh, good. You've really narrowed it down for me."
"I'm sorry, it's just ... " She tried to stamp down the rush of emotion. "I think we're in a desert."
"Cactuses and tumbleweeds?"
"No just a lot of sand. It's kind of orangish-gold, with hints of pink, and I can see tiny clouds of it floating above the ground, like ... like smoke."
"Piles up in lots of hills?"
"Yes, exactly! And it's beautiful."
Thorne snorted. "If this is how you feel about a desert, I can't wait until you see your first real tree. Your mind will explode. — Marissa Meyer

I was in the habit of calling a kiss a peck. Bulkaen had said "a smack." As erotic language, such as we use in dalliance, is a kind of secretion, a concentrated juice that flows from the lips only in moments of the most intense emotion, of plaint, as this language is, in other words, the essential expression of passion, each pair of lovers has its own peculiar language, a language which has a perfume, an odor sui generis which belongs only to that couple ... intimacy ... the secret rites of a deep love. — Jean Genet

We become our own enemy when we are thrown out of balance by anger, hatred, grief, or any other intense emotion. We are for the time being obsessed by something alien. — Swami Paramananda

Feelings aren't good or bad. They're just weak or strong. Love, for example, is weak: someone loves you, you love them back, you're happy for a while, and then it fades away. But if one of those lovers betrays the other, then you have a real emotion - then you have something powerful, something that leaves a mark you'll never be rid of. Betrayal is the most delicious of all, but it takes a while to set it up, and fear can be just as intense if you know what you're doing. — Dan Wells

The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden. — Thomas Mann

In the outworks of our lives, we were almost strangers, but we shared a certain outlook on human life and human destiny, which, from the very first, made a bond of extreme strength . . . . At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other that I have known. We looked into each other's eyes, half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs. — Bertrand Russell

Shame is such an intense emotion. It just can drive you. — Kyra Sedgwick

Doubtless almost any intense emotion may open our 'inward eye' to the beauty of reality. Falling in love appears to do it for some people. The beauties of nature or the exhilaration of artistic creation does it for others. Probably any high experience may momentarily stretch our souls up on tiptoe, so that we catch a glimpse of that marvelous beauty which is always there, but which we are not often tall enough to perceive. — Margaret Prescott Montague

I wondered whether systems in the brain concerned with the perception (or projection) of meaning, significance, and intentionality, systems underlying a sense of wonder and mysteriousness, systems for appreciation of the beauty of art and science, had lost their balance in schizophrenia, producing a mental world overcharged with intense emotion and distortions of reality. These systems had lost their middle ground, it seemed, so that any attempt to titrate them, damp them down, could tip the person from a pathologically heightened state to one of great dullness, a sort of mental death. — Oliver Sacks

Like all sciences, chemistry is marked by magic moments. For someone fortunate enough to live such a moment, it is an instant of intense emotion: an immense field of investigation suddenly opens up before you. — Yves Chauvin

Into the middle of that cauldron of intense, violent emotion suddenly came something soft and gentle. A wisp of memory. Courage. Beauty. A woman. Not any woman, but his woman, his lifemate. All red hair and fire. She walked like an angel where men feared to tread, where even his own kind would fear to venture. — Christine Feehan

Haven't you ever known someone rejected by a lover, who, consumed by rage and jealousy, never lets go? They look on from a distance, unseen but boiling inside. The emotion never seems to tire, this hatred mixed with intense obsession, even with a kind of twisted love. — Scott Westerfeld

I consider my work optimistic in that the people, during the period I'm writing about them, are experiencing intense emotion. It is my belief that this is all there is to it. — Don Carpenter

The few Americans he had encountered in his lifetime had all seemed flat to him, as if freedom weakened one's capacity for intense emotion by demanding too little of it. — G. Willow Wilson

I see writing and acting as different parts of the same continuum. Writing is better for intense emotion. If you're very angry about something, you shouldn't present it as strongly when you're acting. But if you're really angry and writing about it, that's the best way to get it out and across. — Jesse Eisenberg

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism. — Arthur Miller

Unprocessed intense emotion goes underground and creates a subconscious block that can be released as soon as the original event is integrated in the mind, heart, and body. — Deborah Sandella

Deep emotional response to music typically arises as a product of the most intense musical perception. It is generally in virtue of the recognition of emotions expressed in music, or of the emotion-laden gestures embodied in musical movement, that an emotional reaction occurs. — Jenefer Robinson

People talk of calf-love with wistful disdain, but mine was as intense as any emotion I knew until I crossed the frontier, years later, when I discovered that all loving is a loving of life in the midst of death. — Hugh MacLennan

Fear is the oldest and strongest emotion known to man, something deeply inscribed in our nervous system and subconscious. Over time, however, something strange began to happen. The actual terrors that we faced began to lessen in intensity as we gained increasing control over our environment. But instead of our fears lessening a well, they began to multiply in number. We started to worry about our status in society- whether people liked us, or how we fit into the group. We became anxious for our livelihoods, the future of our families and children, our personal health, and the aging process. Instead of a simple, intense fear of something powerful and real, we developed a kind of generalized anxiety. — Robert Greene

Like poetry, in times of intense emotion the image returns to me. Like poetry, it stroked my soul and, by turns, lulled and stoked my senses. — Lisa St. Aubin De Teran

I think I land somewhere between Scorsese and Capra in what I'm drawn to emotionally; I'm drawn to very intense emotion. Capra freaked people out when they saw Jimmy Stewart lose it in 'It's a Wonderful Life.' — David O. Russell

It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist's real problem--a problem still incompletely imagined and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o'-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts, no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality. — Vera Brittain

According to Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, if you're feeling an intense emotion like anxiety or anger, there are two ways to manage it: surface acting or deep acting. Surface acting involves putting on a mask--modifying your speech, gestures, and expressions to present yourself as unfazed...In deep acting, known as method acting in the theater world, you actually become the character you wish to portray. Deep acting involves changing your inner feelings, not just your outer expressions of them...Deep acting turns out to be a more sustainable strategy for managing emotions than surface acting. Research shows that surface acting burns us out: Faking emotions that we don't really feel is both stressful and exhausting. If we want to express a set of emotions, we need to actually experience them. — Adam Grant

How do people know for certain when they find their lifemate?"
Julian's smile was like a physical touch, a soft caress. "I have lived centuries without seeing color or feeling emotion.And then I found you. The world is now beautiful again and filled with life, with color, with so much intense emotion I can barely process it. When I look at you my body is alive. My heart is overwhelmed. You are the one."
"What happens if the woman does not feel it also?" Desari asked, curious. This was an entirely new concept to her, one she had never considered.
"There is only one true lifemate for each of us. If the male feels it, so does his mate." His white teeth flashed at her. "Perhaps she might wish to be stubborn and not admit it right away, not wanting her freedom curtailed for all time. Because there are so few of our women, they are guarded carefully from birth and given into the care of their lifemate as soon as they are of age. — Christine Feehan

People fall in love more easily when they are already troubled by another emotion because we know that any intense emotional state greatly increases the risk of falling in love. — Francois Lelord

Game designers are obsessed with emotion. How do we create the emotions that we want gamers to feel, and how can we really make it this intense, emotional experience? — Jane McGonigal

I kept thinking, as I was telling Didi, that somehow what was in my head
in my memory, in my thoughts
was not being translated fully into the world. I felt as though three-dimensional people and events were becoming two-dimensional in the telling, and as though they were smaller as well as flatter, that they were just less for being spoken. What was missing was the intense emotion that I felt, which, like water or youth itself, buoyed these small insignificant encounters into all that they meant to me. There they were, shrinking before my eyes, shrinking into my words. Anything that can be said, can be said clearly. Anything that cannot be said clearly, cannot be said. — Claire Messud

Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obviously enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being - flesh, blood, skin, hair - but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why - I couldn't put my finger on it. — Bret Easton Ellis

If you do not want what I want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong. Or if my beliefs are different from yours, at least pause before you set out to correct them. Or if my emotion seems less or more intense than yours, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel other than I do. Or if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, please let me be. I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up trying to change me into a copy of you. — David Keirsey

I would love to work with Ron Howard. I think he is brilliant. I love the stories that he chooses. Theyre always very personal and intense. He loves a lot of emotion, and hes so well equipped to pull all of that out of the actors. I really love that kind of thing and I think thats what movies should be about. — Tippi Hedren

The ability to discern the thoughts and motives of your heart (especially when experiencing intense emotion) is an essential skill for the believer. Recognizing thoughts and imaginations of the heart is a prerequisite of bringing them 'captive to the obedience of Christ'. — Lou Priolo

On opening the incubator I experienced one of those rare moments of intense emotion which reward the research worker for all his pains: at first glance I saw that the broth culture, which the night before had been very turbid was perfectly clear: all the bacteria had vanished ... as for my agar spread it was devoid of all growth and what caused my emotion was that in a flash I understood: what causes my spots was in fact an invisible microbe, a filterable virus, but a virus parasitic on bacteria. Another thought came to me also, If this is true, the same thing will have probably occurred in the sick man. In his intestine, as in my test-tube, the dysentery bacilli will have dissolved away under the action of their parasite. He should now be cured. — Felix D'Herelle

Love is a very intense and strong emotion, and it'll make you do some weird things. But I'm always for love, and I think when you find something really special, you need to do whatever you have to do to hold onto it. — Shaun Fleming

Singing is a way of releasing an emotion that you sometimes can't portray when you're acting. And music moves your soul, so music is the source of the most intense emotions you can feel. — Amanda Seyfried

In the life cycle of an intense emotion, if it isn't acted upon, it eventually peaks and then decreases. But as Dr. Linehan explains, people with BPD have a different physiological experience with this process because of three key biological vulnerabilities (1993a): First, we're highly sensitive to emotional stimuli (meaning we experience social dynamics, the environment, and our own inner states with an acuteness similar to having exposed nerve endings). Second, we respond more intensely and much more quickly, than other people. And third, we don't 'come down' from our emotions for a long time. One the nerves have been touched, the sensations keep peaking. Shock waves of emotion that might pass through others in minutes keep cresting in us for hours, sometimes days. — Kiera Van Gelder

The Angels shows are really intense. We play for a couple hours at a time. They're very theatrical and full of audience interaction and emotion. I've seen a lot of people crying and stuff. It's a little bit like church, but it's very secular. — Tom DeLonge

When you have any sort of intense emotional reaction, you have a choice: look for proof that you should feel it even deeper or look for the thought process that is triggering the emotion. One takes you on a downwards spiral, while the other upwards. One breeds toxic patterns, the other awareness. The choice is yours. — Vironika Tugaleva

I can't remember feeling this way ... since well, ever. It's new. It's scary. It's exciting. It's nerve-racking. It's calming. It's every single emotion I've ever felt balled up into an intense urge to grab hold of her and never let go. — Colleen Hoover

You have to know this: running a 100m race is an intense experience. You have a lot of emotion at the end of the race. It is not easy to control that when you win. — Maurice Greene

Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonia could not bring herself to read to him and the more he saw this, the more roughly
and irritably he insisted on her doing so. He understood only too well how painful it was for her to betray and unveil all
that was her own. He understood that these feelings really were her secret treasure, which she had kept perhaps for
years, perhaps from childhood, while she lived with an unhappy father and distracted step mother crazed by grief, in the midst of starving children and unseemly abuse and reproaches. But at the same time he knew now and knew for
certain that, although it filled her with dread and suffering, yet she had a tormenting desire to read and to read to him that he might hear it, and to read now whatever might come of it! ... He read this in her eyes, he could see it in her intense emotion. She mastered herself, controlled the spasm in her throat and went on reading the eleventh chapter of St.
John. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, fucking, drinking, art - poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one's person and possessions. — Thomas Cahill

Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great. — Leonard Bernstein

A pain so vibrant and intense that it seemed to become a sound inside me that rang out at an unwavering pitch and my whole body was now just an instrument that could play only that one note, and I was its audience of one. There was nothing else to experience. No thought could enter, no emotion be felt. Only the pain existed and I existed only for the pain to be felt. — Adam M. Booth

When someone stirs a world of emotion in you and it's so intense you can barely stand to be with him. — Lang Leav

Vinyl survived, we managed not to kill it. Knowing that you've taken part in this fight ... You can't imagine the happiness it brings. Every time I see a kid going out of the store with a vinyl record under the arms, my heart beats faster. Music should only be this. An intense emotion. — Jack White

He said that love was an emotion contra natura that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the more intense it was, the more ephemeral. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion. — Carol Ann Duffy

The sadness and shock in his voice devastated Alex, and she wrapped her arms around him. He remained still, not responding to her attempt to comfort him for the first few seconds until, consumed by emotion, he caught her in an intense embrace, burying his face in her neck. They stayed that way, wrapped tightly together, sharing their strength in the silence. And — Sarah MacLean

Music for a long time has been telling what the world is like. What music has to say now, in a manner that has both logic and emotion in it, is that the world has a structure persons could like; be stronger by ... [If] the world is the oneness of opposites - and music says it is - the world is given an everlastingly sensible basis; for what could be more sensible that to be calm and forceful at once, reposeful and intense at once? — Eli Siegel

Yes, the Beast changed.
He spoke more now, and did not gaze at Beauty in the same intense, almost pained way, as if he were feeling every emotion she felt. He did not sigh in his sleep when she sighed and his stomach didn't growl when hers hurt. He could not read her thoughts anymore, and she could not read his. He seemed a bit more clumsy and guarded and distant, too. They no longer ran through the woods together, although they still walked there sometimes. They quarreled and raised their voices to each other once in a while. Each time, after they quarreled, Beauty bathed, combed the tangles from her hair, and began to wear shoes again for a few days. — Francesca Lia Block

Our world is integrated to an unprecedented degree, while the global political awakening is injecting into interstate relations an intense amount of tension, emotion, even irrationality, which could cumulatively produce circumstances that preclude an effective and genuinely shared universal response to new global problems. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

You all seem to think you should marry someone when you feel this intense emotion, which you call love. And then you expect the love will fade over time, as life gets harder. When what you should do is find yourself a nice enough fellow and let real love develop over years and births and deaths and so on. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Thoughts of You
There were times when I was with him and it was too much. Does that make sense? When someone stirs a world of emotion in you and it's so intense you can barely stand to be with him.
During those moments, I wanted so desperately to leave - to go home, walk into my bedroom, and shut the door behind me. Crawl into bed and lay there in the dark, tracing the outline of my lips with my fingers - replaying everything he said, everything we did. I wanted to be left alone - with nothing other than my thought of him. — Lang Leav

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion. — Willa Cather

ANYAELE SAM CHIYSON'S LAW OF PASSION: You must have a longing to succeed in accordance with your desires: Your intense, high-wrought emotion that compels you to action must be high-powered to get you fervent and excited to do what is required by the terms so as to make your desires a success. Get ready to follow through your innovations. Create your structures! Do things right to a turn and ardently carry your strategies to a successful completion and accomplish your desires. — Anyaele Sam Chiyson