Being Bitter Quotes & Sayings

It's not about being bitter, it's about getting better — LL Cool J

Being on stage is a seductive lifestyle. My advice to aspiring actors is think twice. People sometimes go into acting for the wrong reasons - as a shortcut to fame and fortune. If these goals are not attained, they feel a bitter disappointment. — Chris Sarandon

A bitter experience makes us a better person. — Saru Singhal

Water is a commodity not by any means to be found everywhere ... When found, it is more than likely to be bad, being either from a bitter alkaline pool, or from a hole in a creek, so muddy that it can only be called liquid by courtesy. — Theodore Roosevelt

Though I can't change what happened, I can choose how to react. And I don't want to spend the rest of my life being bitter and locked up. — Tori Amos

My life has been full of struggles - coming from a troubled home, moving out when I was fifteen, ending up homeless by eighteen. The one thing I always knew was being jaded and bitter was equal to letting life win. — Jewel

I cried out for the pain of man,
I cried out for my bitter wrath
Against the hopeless life that ran
For ever in a circling path
From death to death since all began;
Till on a summer night
I lost my way in the pale starlight
And saw our planet, far and small,
Through endless depths of nothing fall
A lonely pin-prick spark of light,
Upon the wide, enfolding night,
With leagues on leagues of stars above it,
And powdered dust of stars below-
Dead things that neither hate nor love it
Not even their own loveliness can know,
Being but cosmic dust and dead.
And if some tears be shed,
Some evil God have power,
Some crown of sorrow sit
Upon a little world for a little hour-
Who shall remember? Who shall care for it? — C.S. Lewis

Please know that there are much better things in life than being lonely or liked or bitter or mean or self conscious. We are all full of shit. Go love someone just because, I know your heart may be badly bruised, or even the victim of numerous knifings but it will always heal even if you don't want it to, it keeps going. There are the most fantastic, beautiful things and people out there, I promise. It's up to you to find them. — Chuck Palahniuk

Some of our superiors were indeed men of brains and learning and disinterested goodwill, but some were stuffed shirts, and some incompetents, and some timid souls escaping the fray, and some climbers, and some as bitter and jealous as some of us were at being inadequately appreciated. But still there they were, up in the sunshine above the smoke, a patch-elbowed tweedy elite that we might improve when we joined it, but that we never questioned. Especially during the Depression, when every frog of us was lustful for a lily pad. — Wallace Stegner

Michael, from Six Dance Lessons he was somebody who had a lot of self-loathing; being a gay man who lost his family and felt ostracized. It was an interesting character to play. He was so bitter and jaded about life. Even though I'm not like that personally, everybody has a side of themselves that tends to look at the negative side of things. He was an interesting character to play. — Cheyenne Jackson

Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands. Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun. Or else they didn't try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves. But wives, oh wives, when they weren't being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on their abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease. — Meg Wolitzer

A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony. — George Bernard Shaw

The revolutionary woman knows the world she seeks to overthrow is precisely one in which love between equal human beings is well nigh impossible. We are still part of the ironical working-out of this, our own cruel contradiction. One of the most compelling facts which can unite women and make us act is the overwhelming indignity or bitter hurt of being regarded as simply 'the other', 'an object', 'commodity', 'thing'. We act directly from a consciousness of the impossibility of loving or being loved without distortion. But we must still demand now the preconditions of what is impossible at the moment. It is a most disturbing dialectic, our praxis of pain. — Sheila Rowbotham

The sight of these closed golden houses with their warmth of life awoke in him a bitter, poignant, strangely mixed emotion of exile and return, of loneliness and security, of being forever shut out from the palpable and passionate integument of life and fellowship, and of being so close to it that he could touch it with his hand, enter it by a door, possess it with a word
a word that, somehow, he could never speak, a door that, somehow, he would never open. — Thomas Wolfe

The sun was up, the neighborhood waking. I wiped my face clean with the back of my sleeve, the warming air soft on my wet cheeks. A prayer welled up within me, a new kind of prayer. I was done begging God to forgive me for being too bitter, too needy, too egotistical, too tired. Repenting one day for being too much, the next for not being enough.

Now I clearly understood my real offence against heaven: the stubborn refusal that every failing that I had - from the first - had been forgiven. — Bethany Pierce

It was a curious game. This curiousness was evidenced, for example, in the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting. He saw his girl seducing a strange man, and had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him). He had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext for her unfaithfulness.
This was all the worse because he worshipped rather than loved her. It had always seemed to him that her inward nature was real only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point. — Milan Kundera

Learning what all you can overcome as a person, as a human being, is very important. It's very important to understand your strength. Which is not to say you become hardened or bitter. — Katrina Kaif

Your relationship with your brother will be, in many ways, the most complex and bewildering of all the interpersonal connections you will form. An older brother is both authority and peer, friend and bitter enemy, partner and rival, and will play these contradictory roles to varying degrees throughout your life. At this point the rivalry is most prominent, owing to the difference in age and the resentment your brother feels toward you monopolizing your mother's attention. Try to remember, in the face of the poor treatment you receive at his hands, that more than a pure desire to cause you harm or pain, this is an effort on his part to win back some of that attention, even if it's only through being scolded and punished. — Ron Currie Jr.

And except on a certain kind of winter evening - six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that - except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. — Joan Didion

These tears are proof that there is love in the world. Tears are only bitter when we cry selfishly for ourselves. When we deny and forget the sweet love that tears are made of. When we let sorrow turn to anger. When people cry for each other, it is a good thing. Always remember that you are a human being, connected to all other human beings. When you cry for others you are opening your heart to God, who must see what we do and weep for us, too, for the suffering we cause to one another and to ourselves. — Nafisa Haji

Knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. All those bitter home truths she had flung at me, right from the beginning ... and still loved me; was so blind that she still loved me. One day she had said: When you love me (and she had not meant "make love to me") it's as if God forgave me for being the mess I am; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and so give me a sense of responsibility towards her. — John Fowles

I know I'm bitter and a little jaded, and mildly enjoy it, but am I a sad person? Am I happy?
I plan on being happy in the future for sure, but it isn't here yet. So what does that make me, exactly? — Chris Colfer

I don't see the point in being bitter. — Shayne Ward

Border crossings in the Balkans, where bitter wars have been waged, were not regarded as pleasurable; in many places, they weren't even possible, and one avoided them. But, while riding in the droshky and later, when we dismounted, we saw the most luxuriant orchards and vegetable gardens, dark-violet eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, gigantic pumpkins and melons; I couldn't get over my amazement at all the different things that grew here. "That's what it's like here", said Mother, "a blessed land. And it's a civilized land, no one should be ashamed of being born here. — Elias Canetti

See, I'm the worst breed of human. Let me explain. Some people are dead inside. They go through life knowing this, and they manage fine enough, because, well, they're dead inside. They aren't bitter because they don't care enough to change. They just try to get by with the things they can control. Others live in the fucking clouds, watch romantic comedies, and dream about everything being perfect one day. These people are always fine because they have an everlasting well of hope inside them, and no matter what happens they'll just romanticize their existence.
But when it comes to me ... I'm someone who's mostly dead inside but still has a little hope for something extraordinary, which, as I said, is the worst breed of human, because it means that I know everything is bullshit, but that I secretly hope for the day when it might not be. The tension makes me wish I were just completely dead inside. It would makes things much easier for me. — Nick Miller

Life is flying by. You don't have time to waste another minute being negative, offended or bitter. If someone did you wrong, get over it and move forward. — Joel Osteen

Once you're out of the classroom, you might vow never to open another book, after being force-fed their contents for so many years. But know this: Books are the most worthy companions to take with you on this bitter-sweet journey known as life. — Cassandra King

Please don't hate you??!! I hate that I love you. Loving you made me waste a year of my life. Loving
you made me be passionate about nothing but you. Loving you made me take risks I never would have
otherwise. Loving you made me give it up to you. Loving you made me neglect my parents and Amy.
Loving you made me not care that my grandma just died. Loving you made me turn out bitter and
hopeless like her. Loving you made me hate myself for being dumped by you. Loving you made me
deluded, irrational, inconsiderate, and a liar. And because I love you, you're always going to haunt me. — Daria Snadowsky

Now you ask a group of young women on the college campus, 'How many of you are feminists?' Very few will raise their hands, because young women don't want to be associated with it anymore because they know it means male-bashing, it means being a victim, and it means being bitter and angry. — Christina Hoff Sommers

Morse found it nerve-wracking to cross the St. Jude grounds just as school was being dismissed, because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert and if he didn't smile they might think he was an old grouch made bitter by the world, which surely, he felt, by certain yardsticks, he was. Sometimes he wasn't entirely sure that he wasn't a wacko of sorts, although certainly he wasn't a pervert. Of that he was certain. Or relatively certain. Being overly certain, he was relatively sure, was what eventually made one a wacko. So humility was the thing, he thought, arranging his face into what he thought would pass for the expression of a man thinking fondly of his own youth, a face devoid of wackiness or perversion, humility was the thing. — George Saunders

I am not a success if all I do is fit into somebody's prescription; its better to stand out and be celebrated for being a definition. The world would prefer to take the bitter pills of an achiever than the sweet chocolates of a mediocre. — Bayode Ojo

That's just how white folks will do you. It wasn't merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn't know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn. — Barack Obama

I understand that if you focus on what is wrong in your life, that is all you will see." Marian put her hands on Alditha's shoulders. "But if you open your eyes, you will see all the good gifts God has given you. If you continue to see only the bad, you will become bitter and angry. If you decide to see what is good, you will go back to being the smiling girl I grew up with and loved." Alditha swallowed hard. The words of the priest came to her. "This life, though hard, is a gift. Sometimes even I do not understand all of His ways, but I will tell you this; he loves you, and everything he does or does not do is for your good. You simply have to have faith to see it that way. — Sarah Holman

She wasn't bitter. She was sad, though. But it was a hopeful kind of sad. The kind of sad that just takes time. — Stephen Chbosky

I'm not going to write any more novels. I don't want to end up being one of these angry, bitter writers moaning that only three people are reading him. I don't want that. — Jim Crace

Music - good music, great music - had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something. — Julian Barnes

Music critics are, for the most part, bitter people who are intent at dragging people down for being successful at what they want to do, which is probably music. The oddity of being a critic is: You don't get a diploma, you just decide you're a critic. If someone listens to your opinion rather than their own, it's their mistake. Any critic's top 10, any year, it's something controversial or something that will make them look hipper-than-thou. The whole critic game, we've never played. — Paul Stanley

Even though I've never met my dad and don't really want to, I share some of his talents. Along with being the messenger of the gods, Hermes is the god of merchants-which explains why I'm good with money-and travelers, which explains why the divine jerk left my mom and never came back. He's also the god of thieves. He's stolen things like-oh, Apollo's cattle, women, good ideas, wallets, my mom's sanity, and my chance at a decent life.
Sorry, did that sound bitter? — Rick Riordan

I've learned that you cannot be bitter and happy. You cannot be pitiful and powerful at the same time, you have to choose one of them. If you've had a lot of people that have hurt you, then you won't help yourself by being bitter, resentful and pitiful about it. Forgiveness is freedom, and forgiveness is power. — Jeanette Coron

Being gay is like taking a crash course in human nature," he says. "Your first real glimpse at the dirty underbelly of routine social interaction. A lesser person, " he offers with a wry grin, "Might well become one bitter fuck. — Jonathan Tropper

The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame. — George Eliot

Fine food is poison. It can be as bitter as antimony and bitter almonds and as repulsive as swallowing live toads. Like the poison the emperor took every day to stop himself being poisoned, fine food must be taken daily until the system becomes immune to its ravages and the taste buds beaten and abused to the point where they not only accept but savour every vile concoction under the sun. — Lisa St. Aubin De Teran

She knew how to hit to a hair's breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty ... At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed, they were. The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other. — Thomas Hardy

It is a remarkable irony that many of the best shows in London - Chicago, Oklahoma! - and even such harmless diversions as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast - are imports from the colonies, while the homegrown productions include such luxurious twaddle as Mamma Mia!, Bombay Dreams, and Starlight Express. Brits who view' American culture with disdain are the ones who must pay the freight here, being careful not to throw stones from inside their glass houses. Though it is doubtless a bitter pill to swallow, not everything that is idiotic, pandering, or unsophisticated originated in the land of the free and the home of Kenny G. Americans did not invent Cats. — Joe Queenan

If I thought about it, I could be bitter, but I don't feel like being bitter. Being bitter makes you immobile, and there's too much that I still want to do. — Richard Pryor

And then he knew that war is no good, because vanquishing a man is as bitter as being vanquished. — Albert Camus

If conservatives don't want to be seen as bitter people who cling to their guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiments, they should stop being bitter and clinging to their guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiments. — Bill Maher

You will find as the children grow up that as a rule children are a bitter disappointment - their greatest object being to do precisely what their parents do not wish and have anxiously tried to prevent. — Queen Victoria

The Strongman continued his mental review. "And the petty little saints in the town were . . . obscure, don't you see, far from help, far from the mainstream, alone amid the rolling farmlands . . . unknown. It was a perfect place to begin the process." His beastly face grew tight and bitter. "Until they started praying. Until they ceased being so comfortable and started weeping before God! Until they began to reclaim the power of the . . ." The Strongman sealed his lips. "The Cross?" the aide volunteered. — Frank E. Peretti

I believe that being happy is the only important thing. Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or torturous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive. — Joanne Harris

It was a cold blustery day when he walked out of the courthouse for the last time. He walked down the steps and out the back door and got in his truck and sat there. He couldnt name the feeling. It was sadness but it was something else besides. And the something else besides was what had him sitting there instead of starting the truck. He'd felt like this before but not in a long time and when he said that, then he knew what it was. It was defeat. It was being beaten. More bitter to him than death. You need to get over that, he said. Then he started the truck. — Cormac McCarthy

Unconditional love corresponds to one of the deepest longings, not only of the child, but of every human being; on the other hand, to be loved because of one's merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me,
maybe this, or that - there is always a fear that love could disappear. Furthermore, "deserved" love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is loved only because one pleases, that one is, in the last analysis, not loved at all but used. — Erich Fromm

It isn't easy being a brilliant inventor, always alone. Always misunderstood. Easy to turn bitter, make horrible mistakes. People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.
-Hephaestus — Rick Riordan

There was a song i heard when i was in los angeles by a local group. the song was called "los angeles" and the words and images were so harsh and bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days. the images, i later found out, were personal and no one i knew shared them. the images i had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. these images stayed with me even after i left the city. images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. after i left. — Bret Easton Ellis

I'm stuck struggling in the cold water, and all I can do is grieve, grieve, in the hoar necessitous horror of the morning, bitterly I hate myself, bitterly it's too late yet while I feel better I still feel ephemeral and unreal and unable to straighten my thoughts or even really grieve, in fact I feel too stupid to be really bitter, in short I don't know what I'm doing and I'm being told what to do ... — Jack Kerouac

Mark my words: Being dead isn't all sitting around in remorseful reflection and bitter self-recrimination. Death, like life, is what you make of it. — Chuck Palahniuk

Love is an excellent thing and a very great blessing, indeed. It makes every difficulty easy. It bears a burden without being weighted, and renders sweet all that is bitter. Love knows no limits, feels no burden, thinks nothing of troubles, attempts more than it is able, because it believes that it may and can do all things; for this reason it is able to do all, performing much where he who does not love fails and falls. Love is watchful. Sleeping, it does not slumber. Like a living flame, a burning torch, it tends upward and passes unharmed through every obstacle. Whatever faults may be committed, big or small, whatever clouds may pile up on the horizon, dark and threatening, love will overcome all. — Maria Augusta Von Trapp

One may have been a fool, but there's no foolishness like being bitter. — Kathleen Norris

The wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: "This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth." It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer. — Willa Cather

Because being a fan is not all about the good times when victory makes life better. Dealing with defeat helps mold you as a fan. If you didn't experience the bitter taste of losing, then you wouldn't have any humility. You wouldn't have a heart. You'd be a New York Yankees fan. — Mark Tye Turner

I'd always secretly believed that a love as fierce and true as mine would be rewarded in the end, and now I was being forced to accept the bitter truth. — Alma Katsu

How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites? ... How long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do? — Andrew Manis

For thirty millennia, three thousand years on Rathillien alone, the Kencyrath had fought the long retreat from world to world, down the Chain of Creation, waiting for their god to manifest himself through them in final battle. Chosen they were and proud, but bitter, too, over long delay, and angry that, the task being set, their god had apparently left them to accomplish it alone. — P.C. Hodgell

We don't consider manual work as a curse, or a bitter necessity, not even as a means of making a living. We consider it as a high human function, as the basis of human life, the most dignified thing in the life of the human being, and which ought to be free, creative. Men ought to be proud of it. — David Ben-Gurion

She was being a jealous, bitter and incredibly selfish friend, she knew that, but Holly needed to be selfish these days in order to survive. She — Cecelia Ahern

No one seems to have thought of the fact that life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It's just more comfortable. And even then: I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something. — Muriel Barbery

The most difficult lesson is not being bitter - that balancing you need to do so you don't become bitter, even as you cease being gullible. — Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change ... [T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition. — H.L. Mencken

Our unclaimed Shunemite, however, can only look on. No kiss for her. Being the most beautiful woman in Israel isn't enough for Solomon. Solomon is seeking partners to help him grow a very special nation. Abishag is relegated to wishing Solomon's new wives well, but in the mean time, her life as an outsider is bitter. 'Take me away,' she will later lament.
pg 5 — Michael Ben Zehabe

To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man. — Anton Chekhov

Let us not fear the opposition of men; every great movement in the Church from Paul down to modern times has been criticized on the ground that it promoted scensoriousness and intolerance and disputing. Of course the gospel of Christ, in a world of sin and doubt will cause disputing; and if does not cause disputing and arrouse bitter opposition, that is a fairly sure sign that it is not being faithfully proclaimed. — John Gresham Machen

I thought of how Midori had once articulated the idea of mono no aware, a sensibility that, though frequently obscured during cherry blossom viewing by the cacophony of drunken doggerel and generator-powered television sets, remains steadfast in one of the two cultures from which I come. She had called it "the sadness of being human." A wise, accepting sadness, she had said. I admired her for the depths of character such a description indicated. For me, sad has always been a synonym for bitter, and I suspect this will always be so. — Barry Eisler

Being cynical isn't necessarily being negative or bitter. It's a person who is wary of mistaking love for something that it's not and getting their heart broken. — Charlyne Yi

Life is going by. Don't waste a minute being negative, offended, or bitter. Choose to be happy. — Joel Osteen

Depressions and melancholy are often a cover for tremendous greed.
At the beginning of an analysis there is often a depressed state of resignation-life has no meaning, there is no feeling of being in life. An exaggerated state can develop into complete lameness. Quite young people give the impression of having the resignation of a bitter old man or woman. When you dig into such a black mood you find that behind it there is overwhelming greed-for being loved, for being very rich, for having the right partner, for being the top dog, etc.
Behind such a melancholic resignation you will often discover in the darkness a recurring theme which makes things very difficult, namely if you give such people one bit of hope, the lion opens its mouth and you have to withdraw, and then they put the lid on again, and so it goes on, back and forth. — Marie-Louise Von Franz

Pippa's laugh is bitter, tinged with tears. 'Ha! Why do girls think being beautiful will solve every problem? Being beautiful just creates problems. It's a misery. I wish I were someone else. — Libba Bray

Another Weeping Woman
Pour the unhappiness out
From your too bitter heart,
Which grieving will not sweeten.
Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.
The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world
Leaves you
With him for whom no phantasy moves,
And you are pierced by a death. — Wallace Stevens

Of all the bitter and heavy things in this sorry old world, the not being necessary is the bitterest and heaviest. — Margaret Deland

In that way Vinteuil's phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain acquisition of sentiment, has espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain. — Marcel Proust

The hardest thing about being an outcast isn't the love you don't receive. It's the love you long to give that nobody wants. After a while, it backs up into your system like stagnant water and turns toxic, poisoning your spirit. When this happens, you don't have many choices available. You can become a bitter loner who goes through life being pissed off at the world; you can fester with rage until one day you murder your classmates. Or, you can find another outlet for your love, where it will be appreciated and maybe even returned. — Jodee Blanco

Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despair
Of not being able to express
With a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,
The bleeding of my heart. — Fernando Pessoa

When a thoughtful human being has overcome incentives to vice and is aware of having done his bitter duty, he finds himself in a state that could be called happiness, a state of contentment and peace of mind in which virtue is its own reward. — Immanuel Kant

Bitterness isn't as authentic as it looks. Believe it or not, one of the reasons we choose to feel bitter is because it's easier than feeling pain. It makes us feel tough. Being bitter gives the illusion that you're fighting, that you're not taking defeat lying down. But bitterness is a log jam. It won't let you get moving. — Barbara Sher

Only by resolving can a human being step into actuality, however bitter this may be to him. Inertia lacks the will to abandon the inward brooding which allows it to retain everything as as a possibility. But possibility is not yet actuality. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

These bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I, with greater policy, concealed my struggles, and flattered you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination; by reason, by reflection, by everything. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence. — Jane Austen

This freedom of which men speak, for which they fight, seems to some people a perilous thing. It has to be earned at a bitter cost and then - it has to be lived with. For freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. — Eleanor Roosevelt

I was pregnable once," Merill thought to contribute. She remembered how troublesome it made getting around, having a ripe belly. Couldn't roll properly, couldn't hop properly, couldn't romp or flop properly. There were the cravings for roasted cabbage - she loathed cabbage, with its leaves and growing in rows. And labor! Merill passed out during childbirth. She'd endured burns, lacerations, rips, serrated teeth, nails, hooks and a trove of unmentionable harm-inflictors. Labor trounced them all and wriggled gleefully in the spray of blood and gore. "Being pregnable is no good. No good at all. Like growing a bitter melon in your belly. — Darrell Drake

She loved Gilbert - had always loved him! She knew that now. She knew that she could no more cast him out of her life without agony than she could have cut off her right hand and cast it from her. And the knowledge had come too late - too late even for the bitter solace of being with him at the last. If she had not been so blind - so foolish - she would have had the right to go to him now. But he would never know that she loved him - he would go away from this life thinking that she did not care. — L.M. Montgomery

There are times when you have to obey a call which is the highest of all, i.e. the voice of conscience even though such obedience may cost many a bitter tear, and even more, separation from friends, from family, from the state, to which you may belong, from all that you have held as dear as life itself. For this obedience is the law of our being. — Mahatma Gandhi

A bridge can still be built, while the bitter waters are flowing beneath. — Anthony Liccione

I know I shouldn't feel guilty for being angry sometimes, or bitter" "Knowing something is beans. — Megan Hart

Ethics is not a bitter wind in one's face, stinging a person with injunctions to act against his interest, but a breeze at one's back, aiding a person toward the achievement of life-enhancing values. Morality is not a burden to be resented or scrimped on, complied with only grudgingly. If Rand's theory of the nature of morality is correct, cutting moral corners amounts to cutting one's own throat. Far from being a necessary evil, ethics is a necessary ally, an indispensable tool for living. To the extent that a moral code accurately identifies a life-promoting course, morality is a tremendous benefactor. — Tara Smith

When she looked at herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. A foolish jewelled bride. Her silk sunset-coloured sari shot with gold. Rings on every finger. White dots of sandalwood paste over her arched eye-brows. Looking at herself like this, Ammu's soft mouth would twist into a small, bitter smile at the memory - not of the wedding itself so much as the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile.
Like polishing firewood. — Arundhati Roy

The most valuable thing [Anton LaVey] did that day was to help me understand and come to terms with the deadness, hardness and apathy I was feeling about myself and the world around me, explaining that it was all necessary, a middle step in an evolution from an innocent child to an intelligent, powerful being capable of making a mark on the world. — Marilyn Manson

Being angry at the mistakes made by the heart will only leave you bitter. — Jamie Magee

A child isn't born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let's just say that when I realized that I didn't want to grow up, the damage was already done. Knowing that being grown up was no swell place to be means that you are grown up enough to notice. And you can't go back from there. You have to forge another route, draw your own map. — Hiromi Goto

We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being. — Hermann Hesse

I was giving up
being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter. — Tobias Wolff

I get bitter, angry and disbelieving and I tell my kids there a lot of idiots out there. I also want them to know that being successful is not the real world - that their parents get treated better because they're on TV. — Al Roker

One of my great surprises when I was in America was about twenty-five years ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the way poets were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present, and he was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack. — Stephen Spender