Quotes & Sayings About Bitter Love

Gold

Love is the real currency - the true wealth we all possess. Spend it wisely. — Michael Faudet

I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois's learning and Baldwin's love and Langston's humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art's redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels. — Barack Obama

Grieving the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 4:30). Our anger grieves God's Spirit, not only producing bitter fruit but quenching the fruit of the Spirit in our lives. Rather than operating with love, joy, and peace toward others, a bitter person becomes hateful, negative, and restless, closing off his heart toward others. Bitter people become very unlike themselves. The most loving and joyful people in the world can become hateful, irrational pessimists if they let bitterness take root and don't forgive. Believe it or not, bitterness even hurts us physically. "A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones" (Proverbs 17:22). The tension of trying to contain it can harden our facial features and make us lose the radiance of our countenance, even causing a chemical imbalance in our bodies and lowering our resistance to disease. — Stephen Kendrick

Fairy Tales are born from our need for love and without romance the world is bitter. With love in your heart the world is always sweet. — Nanette Kinslow

I love you," he said.
"I love you too, for all the good it does." She sounded bitter. Angry. Not at him, but at the universe. — Michael Grant

I do here in the most solemn and bitter manner curse the Prime Minister of England for having cumulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy which our accurst "love of peace" can lower us are unfathomable. — Enoch Powell

Bitter love, a violet with it's crown of thorns in a thicet of spiky passions, spear of sorrow, corolla of rage: how did you come to conquer my soul? What brought you? — Pablo Neruda

I shall but love thee bitter after death — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Even in misery we love to be foremost, to have the bitter in our cup acknowledged as more bitter than that of others. — Margaret Oliphant

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

And in the dark of that room, notorious for the woven patterns of desire it had seen, Ammar ibn Khairan held the woman beloved of the man he'd killed, and offered what small comfort he could. He granted her the courtesy and space of his silence, as she finally permitted herself to weep, mourning the depth of her loss, the appalling disappearance, in an instant, of love in a bitter world. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Thank God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was much better than no company. You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human, which I devoutly hope you never will have. "The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet. — Marilynne Robinson

But nothing else escapes all-ruinous time.
Earth's might decays, the might of men decays,
Honor grows cold, dishonor flourishes,
There is no constancy 'twixt friend and friend,
Or city and city; be it soon or late,
Sweet turns to bitter, hate once more to love. — Sophocles

If anything, love is just a starting point. Then life intrudes, along with the personal baggage you've spent years packing, and things get royally and irrevocably fucked up. You can get bitter or you can keep trying. Most people do some of each. — Jonathan Tropper

Love may exist without jealousy, although this is rare: but jealousy may exist without love, and this is common; for jealousy can feed on that which is bitter no less than on that which is sweet, and is sustained by pride as often as by affection. — Charles Caleb Colton

Love alone makes heavy burdens light and bears in equal balance things pleasing and displeasing. Love bears a heavy burden and does not feel it, and love makes bitter things tasteful and sweet. — Thomas A Kempis

Love by faith. Love our enemies by faith. Love our neighbors by faith. Love fellow believers by faith. Love our family members by faith. Love our spouses by faith. Love our in-laws by faith. Love a rebellious teenager by faith. Love our betrayer by faith. Love an ill and bitter parent by faith. Love by faith, not just by feeling. — Beth Moore

...One lives and survives only if one has the ability to swallow and digest bitter and unpalatable things. We, you and I, and our people shall live because there are only a few among us who do not love raw onions. — Jamil Ahmad

Sometimes, you have to love beyond yourself! And that's how you learn to love! That's why you had to drink the bitter glass of your love. — Friedrich Nietzsche

YOU MUSTN'T BE AFRAID OF DEATH
you're a deathless soul
you can't be kept in a dark grave
you're filled with God's glow
be happy with your beloved
you can't find any better
the world will shimmer
because of the diamond you hold
when your heart is immersed
in this blissful love
you can easily endure
any bitter face around
in the absence of malice
there is nothing but
happiness and good times
don't dwell in sorrow my friend
ghazal number 2594 — Rumi

The realms of good fortune and calamity in human life are all made of thoughts and imaginings. Therefore Buddhists say that the burning of desire for gain is itself a pit of fire, while drowning in greedy love is itself a bitter sea. The moment thoughts are pure, fierce flames become a pond; the moment you become aware, the boat has arrived on the further shore. If your thoughts vary at all, your world will immediately differ, so can we not be careful? — Zicheng Hong

Make choices in life that don't leave people bitter, worse off or confused. Any choice that leads you to do this is a choice that didn't include God in the decision making process. — Shannon L. Alder

Oh why rebuke you him that loves you so? / Lay breath so bitter on your bitter foe. — William Shakespeare

I still know in my heart that it is a Godless, dirty game; that love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth and is about the equivalent of people who stimulate themselves with dirty post cards- — Zelda Fitzgerald

World's use is cold, world's love is vain, world's cruelty is bitter bane; but is not the fruit of pain. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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

If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked. — Arthur Miller

Love needs too much help, he said.
hate takes care of itself. — Charles Bukowski

If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, / Give me a bitter glory. — Anna Akhmatova

One sometimes clings tightly to pain, to bitter home-sickness and bitter regret, but one forgets one's guilt; in vain, you might think back to the beginning (who led me this far?). If only you were allowed to accuse once more, turn to others once more, love once more! You plunge into the wide, ocean-like hallucination, you have faith and pray, and forget your dark fear when you gaze into the face of your beloved. But how should one fight it? — Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Though sands be black and bitter black the sea, Night lie before me and behind me night, And God within far Heaven refuse to light The consolation of the dawn for me,
Between the shadowy burns of Heaven and Hell, It is enough love leaves my soul to dwell With memory. — Madison Cawein

My attitude toward friendship has remained the same. I will support and encourage you with all the love in my heart, but if it's not reciprocal, I gotta go [ ... ] If your friends are bitter about your success to the extent that they act out, don't expect them to change [ ... ] Move on. — RuPaul

Relaxing me from head to feet
Love masters me, the bitter sweet
O'er thy limbs breathing;
Yea, Eros now, the god born blind
Sweeps my soul like the mountain wind
Through the oaks seething. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I think you have to pay for love with bitter tears. — Edith Piaf

And from then on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,
Devouring the green azure where, like a pale elated
Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;
Where, suddenly dyeing the blueness, delirium
And slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres,
The bitter redness of love ferments! — Rimbaud Arthur

Love is sweet but its journey can be very bitter — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

He made her play and she had almost forgotten how. Life had been so serious and so bitter. He knew how to play and swept her along with him. — Margaret Mitchell

What is love for, if not to intensify our affections - both in life and death? But, O, do not be bitter. It is tragically self-destructive
to be bitter. — John Piper

You are nipping in the bud fancies which I let blossom. The shore is safer, but I love to buffet the sea - I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger! — Emily Dickinson

Indifference

This hate has blossomed like a living love,
grieving, watching its own exhaustion.
It seeks a face, it seeks flesh, as though it were love.

The worldly flesh and the voices that spoke
are dead, all has shuddered away,
all life hangs on a voice.
Days pass in bitter ecstasy to the sad
caress of the voice that returns
and drains the blood from our faces. Not without sweetness
that voice returns to the mind exhausted
and trembling: once it trembled for me.

But the flesh does not tremble. Only love
could set it alight, this hate seeks it out.
All the possessions, all the flesh and all the voices
in the world cannot equal the burning caress
of that body and those eyes. In the bitter ecstasy
that kills itself, this hate still finds
each day a glance, a broken word,
and grasps them, hungrily, like love. — Cesare Pavese

Contrast is important in life. We understand what light is because we can compare it with what we know is dark. Sweet is made sweeter after we eat something bitter. It's the very same with sadness. And it's important to experience sadness, to embrace it in order to truly know happiness. I was just a flat line until he came along. And maybe now I'm hurting. But isn't that what love is supposed to do? Make you feel, make you brave, make you look at yourself more carefully? — Tarryn Fisher

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy
even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery. — Jean Rhys

Danni was his reward for all the bullshit he'd gone through, the torture, the anger,
hatred and the bitter loneliness. She was going to be the band-aid for his tortured
soul. — R.L. Mathewson

What's wrong with writing about love? Everybody longs for love. — Kate Forsyth

If there is any one person you can't love, then you don't understand love. The bitter cup we have to drink is the dregs of humility; we must see past the outer shells of insecurity to the seed of divinity deep inside each one of us.
No one virtue is strong enough to stand on its own. No one vice is simple enough not to lead to all others. No one person can appreciate and support us as much as we need. No one event is enough to tear apart our lives.
What does this all mean?
We have to give everything or we will have nothing. We cannot take any short cuts. We have to love everyone, or we cannot truly love anyone. No excuse will mean anything to us in the end.
People are beautiful, don't forget that.
Don't let pomp and circumstance, society or folklore fool you with counterfeit beauty.
True beauty is usually not something you can see, but something you feel; something that inspires you. — Michael Brent Jones

Seven Cities was an ancient civilization, steeped in the power of antiquity, where Ascendants once walked on every trader track, every footpath, every lost road between forgotten places. It was said the sands hoarded power within their sussurating currents, that every stone had soaked up sorcery like blood, and that beneath every city lay the ruins of countless other cities, older cities, cities that went back to the First Empire itself. It was said each city rose on the backs of ghosts, the substance of spirits thick like layers of crushed bone; that each city forever wept beneath the streets, forever laughed, shouted, hawked wares and bartered and prayed and drew first breaths that brought life and the last breaths that announced death. Beneath the streets there were dreams, wisdom, foolishness, fears, rage, grief, lust and love and bitter hatred. — Steven Erikson

Never, never is it possible to reach someone if you become angry or bitter only love and gentleness can do it. Maybe not this time but maybe the next or the hundredth time. — Cesar Chavez

Mother I had a beautiful house in Shingdi a vegetable garden Vines of bitter gourd lettuce English spinach and tousled coconut trees Coconuts fell on my darling husbands head One day we made love under the tree Now I was pregnant just like my orchard full of fruits with the love child Oh I ran as hard as I could from the shadow These were shadows of time shadows of the past ... — Mehreen Ahmed

You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There's this and there's that - if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is - I wouldn't give twopence for him' - here Caleb's mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers - 'whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do. — George Eliot

Love? Love is for children and poor people... — Molly Harper

Senseless is the breast and cold
Which relenting love would fold;
Bloodless are the veins and chill
Which the pulse of pain did fill;
Every little living nerve
That from bitter words did swerve
Round the tortur'd lips and brow,
Are like sapless leaflets now
Frozen upon December's bough. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

What we learned here is love tastes bitter when it's gone. — Rob Thomas

Because in the end nothing is worse than seeing the fall of one you loved. It was somehow worse than losing a love. It made everything seem questionable. It made the past bitter and confused. — Cassandra Clare

Love is far better to know, even if it slips from your grasp or doesn't bear fruit like you'd hoped. People who say they regret love, true love, are just bitter liar. — Elise Kova

Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual's special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time and as freely as possible? We cannot leave it to time to solve the dilemma and prevent people from engaging, a few years hence, in bitter and fruitless linguistic conflicts. We know all too well what time will do.
The only possible answer is a voluntary policy aimed at strengthening linguistic diversity and based on a simple idea: nowadays everybody obviously needs three languages. The first is his language of identity; the third is English. Between the two we have to promote a third language, freely chosen, which will often but not always be another European language. This will be for everyone the main foreign language taught at school, but it will also be much more than that
the language of the heart, the adopted language, the language you have married, the language you love. — Amin Maalouf

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death. — Denton Welch

Ah, kiss me, love, and miss me, love,
and dry your bitter tears. (Irish Pub Song) — Nora Roberts

My writing tools were my most precious belongings. My best quill pen was made from a raven's feather ... I was often so poor that I could not pay my mantua-maker, but I always invested in the best ink and parchment. I smoothed it with pumice stone till it was as white and fine as my own skin, ready to absorb the rapid scratching of my quill — Kate Forsyth

Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath
all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each? — H. Rider Haggard

For you see, Captain Flint, I, too, never settle for less than what I want. Or never thought I possibly could. I'm a Redmond. If only you truly understood what this means. So I set out to reorder the world in a way I thought would make me worthy of her love. But my quest has changed me in ways I never anticipated, and I'm not the man who once loved that girl. There's much more to my journey yet. And here's a bitter irony: I've found in becoming heroic, in becoming worthy of her, I've painted myself into an untenable corner. I've more work to do to prove someone's innocence or guilt. — Julie Anne Long

Nothing turns to hate so bitter as what once was love. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Love is a form of energy, and similar to all forms of energy, it is both essential for life and dangerous. Love can enrich a person's life or destroy a person's world. Love is a catalytic agent of change because it makes us dare to become the best person that we can be. Falling in love for the first time drives a person to the cusp of madness, while the bitter aftermath of a love lost irrevocably alters the positive and negative aspects of a person's character. Withstanding rejection by a lover, we discover within us those ingredients that we will need in order to find our life mate and complete ourselves as man and woman. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Your Very Last Days"


Will you live your very last day,
The same way as you lived
Your first?

Will you cry, smile, laugh, and play -
The same way as you did following
Birth?

Will you still look at the world
Full of wonder, love, curiosity, and excitement?
Or will you be dark, bitter and cold,
Without a single drop
Of enlightenment?

Do you live your current days -
Feeling confused,
Depressed,
And AFRAID?

Or do you share your light
In the company
And service of others,
To synergize
Like we were
Made?

Will you live TODAY
With an unquenchable thirst for
Life?

Or,
Will you wait until your very last day -

Wishing you had just
ONE MORE DAY,

To go out and spend
Your time
RIGHT? — Suzy Kassem

In struggling for human dignity the oppressed people of the world must not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives. — Martin Luther King Jr.

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

But I wanted less. I wanted so very much less. And while there were tiny bubbles of "is this what you really want?" all along, I was in denial about it until about forty-five minutes ago. Pretty led to bicker, bicker led to divorce, and divorce led to bitter. I didn't want pretty, then separated. I didn't want bitter; I wanted forever. I wanted swoony, sparky, maddening, sexy love. And if we were going to fight, we'd fight, not bicker. Bickering's the worst. — Alice Clayton

Let no one persuade you of a single thing. Study your hunger and how to feed it. Trust in whatever sounds twist your viscera. Write in the cadences of first love, of second chances, of air raids, of outrage, of the hideous and the hilarious, of headlong acceptance or curt refusal. Make the bitter music of bumdom, the sad shanties of landlessness, cool at the equator and fluid at the pole. Set the sounds that angels make after an all-night orgy. Whatever lengthens the day, whatever gets you through the night. Make the music that you need, for need will be over, soon enough. Let your progressions predict time's end and recollect the dead as if they're all still her. Because they are. — Richard Powers

I'm in love with a girl who knows me better.
Fell for the woman just when I met her.
Took my sweet time when I was bitter.
Someone understands,
She knows how treat a fella right.
Give me that feeling every night,
She wants show love when I wanna fight,
Now someone understand me. — Juxtaposition

I am not saying there will always be flowers and flowers in your life. No, there are thorns, but they too are good. And I am not saying that your life will always be sweet. It will many times be very bitter, but that's how life grows: through dialectics. I am not saying you will always be good. Sometimes you will be very bad, but one thing will be certain: when you are bad you will be authentically bad, and when you are good you will be authentically good. One can trust, one can rely upon you. When you are angry, one can rely on it that your anger is not false, not cold; it is hot and alive. And when you love, one can rely upon you that it is alive and warm. Remember, — Osho

To dedicate oneself as a Victim of Love is not to be dedicated to sweetness and consolations; it is to offer oneself to all that is painful and bitter, because Love lives only by sacrifice and the more we would surrender ourselves to Love, the more we must surrender
ourselves to suffering — Therese De Lisieux

May you listen to the voice within the beat even when you are tired. When you feel yourself breaking down, may you break open instead. May every experience in life be a door that opens your heart, expands your understanding, and leads you to freedom. If you are weary, may you be aroused by passion and purpose. If you are blameful and bitter, may you be sweetened by hope and humor. If you are frightened, may you be emboldened by a big consciousness far wiser than your fear. If you are lonely, may you find love, may you find friendship. If you are lost, may you understand that we are all lost, and still we are guided - by Strange Angels and Sleeping Giants, by our better and kinder natures, by the vibrant voice within the beat. May you follow that voice, for This is the way - the hero's journey, the life worth living, the reason we are here. — Elizabeth Lesser

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

In the struggle to remain a complete person and to love from her fullness instead of her inadequacy a woman may appear hard. She may feel her early conditioning tugging her in the direction of surrender, but she ought to remember that she was originally loved for herself; she ought to hang on to herself and not find herself nagging, helpless, irritable and trapped. Perhaps I am not old enough yet to promise that the self-reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength, but certainly in my experience it has always been so. Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins. A lover who comes to your bed of his own accord is more likely to sleep with his arms around you all night than a lover who has nowhere else to sleep. — Germaine Greer

Leroy's reasoning is dry as a razor, and Chantal agrees: love as an exaltation of two individuals, love as fidelity, passionate attachment to a single person - no, that doesn't exist. And if it does exist, it is only as self-punishment, willful blindness, escape into a monastery. She tells herself that even if it does exist, love ought not to exist, and the idea does not maker her bitter, on the contrary, it produces a bliss that spreads throughout her body. She thinks of the metaphor of the rose that moves through all men and tells herself that she has been living locked away by love and now she is ready to obey the myth of the rose and merge with its giddy fragrance. — Milan Kundera

I stole a bit of a chopped vegetable and was about to put it in my mouth when Jae's long fingers closed over my wrist. "What? You can't eat this raw?"
"It's bitter melon. You won't like it." He went into the fridge and came out with something that looked halfway familiar. "Here, leftover bao. There's char siu inside."
"The red pork stuff? Yeah, I like that. I thought it was Chinese."
"It is. We also eat hamburgers and spaghetti. — Rhys Ford

People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy. — James Baldwin

Love is as bitter as the dregs of sin, As sweet as clover-honey in its cell; Love is the password whereby souls get in To Heaven
the gate that leads, sometimes, to Hell. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A bitter sweet tale of how life cannot be planned and love comes when we don't expect it in all shapes and forms. — Annette J. Dunlea

Let's think of that moment when a woman washed the feet of Jesus with the nard, so expensive: it is a religious moment, a moment of gratitude, a moment of love. And he [Judas] stands apart with bitter criticism: 'But this could have been used for the poor!' This is the first reference that I have found, in the Gospel, to poverty as an ideology. The ideologue does not know what love is, because he does nt know how to give himself. — Pope Francis

Don't be bitter. Everybody suffers. If you can accept your suffering then you will understand other people better. Be grateful for pain. Love life. — Stephen Colbert

Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life. — D.H. Lawrence

You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human which I devoutly hope you never will have. "The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet." There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. That's a bit of fatherly wisdom, but it's also the Lord's truth, and a thing I know from my own long experience — Marilynne Robinson

When I was a boy, playing at the beach, I remember a game I loved, which was an omen of my future life. I would dig a channel with high sides in the sand for the sea to fill. But when the water flooded the path I created for it with such violence that it destroyed everything in its way: my castles made of pebbles, my dikes of sand. It swept away everything, destroying it all, then disappeared, leaving me with a heavy heart, yet not daring to ask for pity, since the sea had only responded to my call. It's the same with love. You call out for it, you plan its course. The wave crashes into your heart, but it's so different from how you imagined it, so bitter and icy. — Irene Nemirovsky

All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory's love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between ... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homewards and let new lights come in with the sun. — F Scott Fitzgerald

If I should stay
I would only be in your way
So I'll go, but I know
I'll think of you each step of the way
And I will always love you
I will always love you
Bitter sweet Memories
That's all I am taking with me
Good-bye. Please don't cry
We both know that I'm not
What you need
But I will always love you
I will always love you. — Dolly Parton

As brother stands by brother in distress, binding up his wounds and soothing his pain, so let us show our love towards our enemy. There is no deeper distress to be found in the world, no pain more bitter than our enemy's. Nowhere is service more necessary or more blessed than when we serve our enemies. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This cry for mercy is possible only when we are willing to confess that somehow, somewhere, we ourselves have something to do with our losses. Crying for mercy is a recognition that blaming God, the world, or others for our losses does not do full justice to the truth of who we are. At the moment we are willing to take responsibility, even for the pain we didn't cause directly, blaming is connected into an acknowledgement of our own role in human brokenness. The prayer for God's mercy comes from a heart that knows that this human brokenness is not a fatal condition of which we have become the sad victims, but the bitter fruit of the human choice to say "No" to love. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Their Christian walk was such that it convinced even their most bitter foes of the sincerity and wholeheartedness of their faith and practice. The foes saw faith working powerfully through love, demonstrated in their straightforward business dealings, charitable deeds to the poor, visiting and comforting the sick and oppressed educating the ignorant, convincing the erring, punishing the wicked, reproving the idle, and encouraging the devout. And all this was done with diligence and sensitivity, as well as joy, peace, and happiness, such that it was obvious that the Lord was truly with them. — Willem Teellinck

Be selfish sometimes. Love yourself. If you always put others before you, you will find yourself feeling beaten down by the world and that will make you bitter. Don't let the world make you bitter, not when you have such a beautiful soul. — Spencer Hoshino

No, Zahra, dear, no! Gentleness isn't weakness.' Her hand, suspended in midair, trembled with emptiness and fell to her side. 'How easy it is to be bitter or angry; that's when you're at your weakest! But when you choose to be kind, to forget your hurt, that's when you find within the greatest strength of all.' She smiled, oh, a smile of such ancient wisdom, her face shone with love. She waited, but when I wouldn't smile back, she walked past me. — Judy Croome

This life is difficult. We lose fathers, brothers, mothers, songbirds and pieces of ourselves. Whips strike the innocent, honors go to the guilty, and there is too much loneliness. I would be a fool to pray for my children to escape all of that. Ask for too much and it might actually turn out worse. But I can pray for small things, like fertile fields, a mother's love, a child's smile - a life that's less bitter than sweet. — Nadia Hashimi

I take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once. — George R R Martin

But as it falleth, in the gentlest hearts Imperious love hath highest set his throne, And tyrannizeth in the bitter smarts Of them, that to him buxom are and prone. — Edmund Spenser

Damn it, it wasn't right. When she lay abed at night, she shouldn't see charging boars and violent tussles. She should dream of the scent of night-blooming jasmine and the texture of organdy and the distant strains of an orchestra playing a stately sarabande. As he had, all those freezing, damp nights.
As he would, in all the bitter years to come.
What had she called him, last night? An insufferable, arrogant cad. Yes, he was.
He wanted Cecily pining for him forever, dreaming she could tame him, yearning for the tender love he could never, ever give.
He wanted her to remember the old Luke, not fantasize about some uncivilized beast.
And if this "werestag" had eclipsed the memory of their kiss with his gory midnight rescue . . .
Luke just would have to do it one better, and give Cecily a new memory to occupy her thoughts. An experience she could never forget. — Tessa Dare

Become broken in your flesh so that your spirit may receive the true love that was always meant to be in your life. His love will heal the ugly, bitter, painful brokenness and replace it with the beauty of real love. — Mandy Fender

Bitter always follows the sweet, especially when it come to love. Especially when it come to forbidden love. — Karina Halle

Love is also like a coconut which is good while it is fresh, but you have to spit it out when the juice is gone, what's left tastes bitter. — Bertolt Brecht

Whatever we focus on is bound to expand. Where we see the negative, we call forth more negative. And where we see the positive, we call forth more positive. Having loved and lost, I now love more passionately. Having won and lost, I now win more soberly. Having tasted the bitter, I now savor the sweet. — Marianne Williamson

Stigmata of Love
A light which lives on what the flames devour,
a grey landscape surrounding me with scorch,
a crucifixion by a single wound,
a sky and earth that darken by each hour,
a sob of blood whose red ribbon adorns
a lyre without a pulse, and oils the torch,
a tide which stuns and strands me on the reef,
a scorpion scrambling, stinging in my chest
this is the wreath of love, this bed of thorns
is where I dream of you stealing my rest,
haunting these sunken ribs cargoed with grief.
I sought the peak of prudence, but I found
the hemlock-brimming valley of your heart,
and my own thirst for bitter truth and art. — Federico Garcia Lorca

"Rachel ... you need help."
I laugh and it's the same bitter laugh I remember him giving when we met so many weeks ago. "So do you."
"I love you." Isaiah says it so simply that my heart soars and sinks at the same time.
"I love you," I whisper. "Did you ever think that loving someone could hurt so bad?"
Isaiah shakes his head and stares out the window.
"What's going to happen to us?" I ask. Because I don't know how the two of us can continue forward. Isaiah refuses to let me in. It's sort of cruel. He's brought me close with his stories of his childhood and with his words of love, but he can't relinquish control. I refuse to be with someone who won't treat me as an equal. — Katie McGarry