Emotional Truth Quotes

“Music Is the Language of Emotions”
― Alexander Morpheigh, The Pythagorean

“None of the other kids my age has to do all the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, and bill paying. It’s just not fair that I have to be an adult when I’m still a kid.”
― Wayne Edwards, A Stone's Throw: A heartwarming story of a city girl and her rancher grandfather turning adversity into love and community

“What we know in our hearts trumps all else.”
― Rich DiSilvio, The Arnolfini Art Mysteries

“As a child, Michael never once heard anyone tell him “I love you.”
― George Critchlow, The Lifer and the Lawyer: A Story of Punishment, Penitence, and Privilege

“drunk on dreams aged
in memory’s casks
the soul gets
what the heart wants”
― John C. Waugh, busted haiku

“And on that day I turned thirty and I started to cry. I cried because all I was eating was a bowl of chicken and mustard on my birthday... 'Aren’t I supposed to have it all figured out by now!?”
― Jeff Johns, Jet Lag Junkie: Unfiltered Tales of a Compulsive Wanderer

“You tell me how you can love someone and then lose ’em and not ever talk about ’em.”
― Laurie Loveman, Memories

“Some things a person’s gotta live with, and for me, it’s nightmares.”
― Laurie Loveman, Memories

“I don’t think you can actually do anything without emotion.”
― Jamie Kershaw, Hurricane to a Rainbow: Anxiety, PTSD, BPD, Autistic Spectrum, and Schizophrenia

“On the other hand, the emotional record was not like a history book; its truths were constantly changing, and true even when incompatible.”
― Julian Barnes

“I taught an introductory creative writing class at Princeton last year and, in addition to the classic ‘show don’t tell’, I often told my students that their fiction needed to have ’emotional truth’ […]: a quality different from honesty and more resilient than fact, a quality that existed not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind of fiction that shows. All the novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have this empathetic human quality. And because I write the kind of fiction I like to read, when I started Half of a Yellow Sun […], I hoped that emotional truth would be its major recognizable trait. […]

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by ‘real life’; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is ‘real’. Yet, […] to write realistic fiction about war, especially one central to the history of one’s own country, is to be constantly aware of a responsibility to something larger than art. While writing Half of a Yellow Sun, I enjoyed playing with minor things [such as inventing a train station in a town that has none]. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time. I could not let a character be changed by anything that had not actually happened. If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally keen to be true to the spirit of the time as well as to artistic vision of it.

The writing itself was a bruising experience. […] But there were also moments of extravagant joy when I recognized, in a character or moment or scene, that quality of emotional truth.”

In the Shadow of Biafra (essay included in the 2007 Harper Perennial edition of Half of a Yellow Sun).”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“There's something about sadness that removes the scales from our eyes.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“For the first time in a long while, I was not merely listened to — I was heard.
Not merely looked at — but truly seen.”
― Ruslana Pidsadiuk, Before the Eyes of Passion

“My writing is hybrid
because it is human —
and the human is never just one thing.

It is poetry,
it is pain,
it is visceral confession,
reflection,
questioning,
philosophy,
and prayer —
all intertwined…”
― Phoenix Moon

“You left like Prometheus in reverse, stealing the fire and leaving me chained to silence.”
― Rita Kay, Her Fire Touched the Sky: Poems of Trauma, Survival, Healing, and the Quiet Rebuilding of a Soul

“I wear my story like flame on bare skin.”
― Rita Kay, Her Fire Touched the Sky: Poems of Trauma, Survival, Healing, and the Quiet Rebuilding of a Soul

“Some knowledge comes not from curiosity, but from fear.”
― Angelika Regossi, Love in Communism: A Young Woman's Adult Story

“Authenticity begins the moment you stop performing the version of yourself that others expect.”
― Yurii Ivchenko

“People rarely fear loneliness. What they truly fear is being fully seen.”
― Yurii Ivchenko, The Art of Being Real: A Journey to Honest Living

“Connection begins where control ends.”
― Yurii Ivchenko, The Art of Being Real: A Journey to Honest Living

“People don’t fear loneliness. They fear being fully seen.”
― Yurii Ivchenko, The Art of Being Real: A Journey to Honest Living

“People don't break suddenly. They fade quietly — one small compromise at a time.”
― Yurii Ivchenko, When the sky forgot my name: A Literary Novel of Survival, Identity, and Finding Home After War