There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt.

In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state. Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little. Feeling is frightening.

When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.