It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.
It's exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that. That's an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.
No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned.
As much as possible, and this as quickly as possible: that is what the great mental and emotional illness craves that is variously called "present" or "culture," but that is actually a symptom of consumption.
The demons of the Devil don't use your weak weaknesses against you, they use your strong ones. If you're rational and logical, they argue their case rationally and logically. If you're loyal and faithful, they turn those against you. If you're passionate and emotional, they make you passionate and emotional about your worse fears. Your weak weaknesses are no use to them.... They find the strongest weaknesses you didn't know were yours and use those against you.
Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
And how do you know when you're doing something right? How do you know that? It feels so. What I know now is that feelings are really your GPS system for life. When you're supposed to do something or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know. The trick is to learn to check your ego at the door and start checking your gut instead.