A Quote by Margaret Atwood

I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.

Margaret Atwood

Quote Topics

Absence Feeling Intense Not Sure Sure Which Worse

Quote Author

Margaret Atwood
Canadian - Novelist
Born: November 18, 1939

Darkness is the absence of light. Happiness is the absence of pain. Anger is the absence of joy. Jealousy is the absence of confidence. Love is the absence of doubt. Hate is the absence of peace. Fear is the absence of faith. Life is the absence of death.

Jess Bowen

During their separation, something had happened to Annabeth's feelings. They'd grown painfully intense-like she'd been forced to withdraw from a life-saving medication. Now she wasn't sure which was more excruciating-living with that horrible absence, or being with him again.

Rick Riordan

Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.

J. K. Rowling

That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal-unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

What? It's my job as best friend to make sure he's not a serial killer. Or an English major, not sure which one's worse.

Shelly Crane

But the absence of tears wasn't the same as an absence of feeling.

Lisa Kleypas

One-third of our people were dangerously ill, getting worse hourly, and we felt sure of meeting the same fate, with death as our only prospect, which in such a country was much worse yet.

Alvar N. C. de Vaca

The feeling of love is measured by the extent of missing the feverish state in which the absence of the other plunges us

Francine Noel

Even if the absence of government really did mean anarchy in a negative, disorderly sense - which is far from being the case - even then, no anarchical disorder could be worse than the position to which government has led humanity.

Leo Tolstoy

Perfect love is to feeling what perfect white is to color. Many think that white is the absence of color. It is not. It is the inclusion of all color. White is every other color that exists, combined. So, too, is love not the absence of an emotion (hatred, anger, lust, jealousy, covetousness), but the summation of all feeling. It is the sum total. The aggregate amount. The everything.

Neale Donald Walsch

The absence of feeling bad isn't enough to make you happy; you must strive to find sources of feeling good

Gretchen Rubin

Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse.

Kelley Armstrong

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

Penelope Lively

The other thing is that it's really hard to separate out the harassment from everything we do. When we started creating Tropes, we were hyper-aware of the intense scrutiny, the intense harassment, and the intense pressure to do something meaningful given the attention both positive and negative. That's carried over in terms of making sure that I produce the best work that I can, that's the most accurate, the most sensitive and engaged.

Anita Sarkeesian

It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odduncanny and highly improbable. G.K.Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things.