Quotes & Sayings About Bittersweet

People return my phone calls now, which is really interesting. I'll tell you what I've learned that's kind of bittersweet. So many doors have opened up. I've met everybody in the business. I'm fortunate people want to work with me. — Tate Taylor

To me, the human experience does involve a great deal of anguish. It's joyful, but it's bittersweet. I just think that's life. — Amy Grant

For that short space of time, she forgot she was sad and a little afraid. She let herself forget that after tonight, she might never see him again and that if she did, whatever it was between them would no longer exist.

When he deepened the kiss and his weight pressed her against the ground, she forgot everything, losing herself in a wave of sensation that carried no threat, inspired no fear, and belonged to no one but her. — Elle Todd

I feel extremely lucky, extremely grateful, and a little bittersweet, too. — Wentworth Miller

Bittersweet is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a sliver of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich when it contains a splinter of sadness. Bittersweet is the practice of believing that we really do need both the bitter and the sweet, and that a life of nothing but sweetness rots both your teeth and your soul. Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the calluses on our hands. — Shauna Niequist

I live with regrets - the bittersweet loss of innocence - the red track of the moon upon the lake - the inability to return and do it again ... — John Geddes

My love, I'd volunteer to live a thousand lives if I got to spend any part of them with you. — Debra Anastasia

The evening air holds the bittersweet tang of what might have been, — Ally Condie

And the flavor of Pippa's kiss
bittersweet and strange
stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky. — Donna Tartt

My childhood was bittersweet in many ways. We moved around a lot. By the time I was 10, I had travelled thousands of miles, often on my own. My parents were like my friends, so it felt like I didn't really have parents at all. But in a crazy way that was very liberating. It forced me to be independent, maybe a leader, and certainly a survivor. — Nile Rodgers

Meridian


First daylight on the bittersweet-hung
sleeping porch at high summer; dew
all over the lawn, sowing diamond-
point-highlighted shadows;
the hired man's shadow revolving
along the walk, a flash of milkpails
passing; no threat in sight, no hint
anywhere in the universe, of that

apathy at the meridian, the noon
of absolute boredom; flies
crooning black lullabies in the kitchen,
milk-soured crocks, cream separator
still unwashed; what is there to life
but chores and more chores, dishwater,
fatigue, unwanted children; nothing
to stir the longueur of afternoon

except possibly thunderheads;
climbing, livid, turreted alabaster
lit up from within by splendor and terror
-- forded lightening's
split-second disaster. — Amy Clampitt

I wore you on me at all times
Like I now carry my pen.
Unlike your own opinion my
Belongings must have a function.
You bled through the ink of my lines and
To be my subject nursed your thirst.

Was it my fault, or your own, that you forgot
- I do not deal in tender verse. — Mie Hansson

It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once more. — Herman Hesse

I think the end of last year when we were aware of that transition was for everyone in their own way kind of bittersweet, but it's also what the show's about, one administration ends and another begins. — Stockard Channing

It was bittersweet and lovely how this thing called family could make you feel belonged, wanted and complete. — Diyar Harraz

I was raped by a doctor. Which is, you know, so bittersweet for a Jewish girl. — Sarah Silverman

Giggles gave way to gasps when his face split into a grin, never mind that he was looking right at her. When he strode across the room and slumped languidly into the seat next to her, the whole room went silent. — Tyffani Clark Kemp

Why do people do evil things?
Messenger's answer stunned me, Why did you? — Michael Grant

I am forever grateful for not knowing - What would have been. WHAT WILL BE holds none of those bittersweet pangs and it is lit w joy. — Erica Goros

I wanted it, I wanted it all. All the ardent beginnings and the confused between-times and the bittersweet dregs.
All of the aches and sorrows, all of the soaring joys.
All of it. — Jacqueline Carey

The bittersweet side of appreciating life's most precious moments is the unbearable awareness that those moments are passing. — Marc Parent

It's kind of bittersweet. The human spirit is not measured by the size of the act, but by the size of the heart. — Yakov Smirnoff

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her. — Gail Caldwell

The best part about being a matchmaker is you are getting credits in heaven, as I really believe I work for God. The worst part is that matchmakers can often fix everyone up, all the way to the altar, but cannot find love themselves, so it is bittersweet. — Patti Stanger

I wanted, of course, for this bittersweet season to be over. I felt so strongly that when I finished the book, I'd be free to move into another season, one of life and celebration. But this is what I know now: they're the same thing, and that's all there is. — Shauna Niequist

I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning. — Vera Brittain

I will feel the pang of separation when she is two, when she is twelve, when she is twenty. My daughter will tackle other more important milestones, other more difficult accomplishments that she must achieve on her own. And I, who once shared a blood supply with her, who once had her all to myself, must wait and watch and smile, and continue this exploration of motherhood, this bittersweet experience of maternal love, this continual process of bravely saying goodbye. — Andrea J. Buchanan

Growing up really is bittersweet. — Jenny Han

Grief, unresisted, is grace. It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt anymore, it doesn't mean it doesn't rip your heart out ... In great grief, there's an incredible love in it. In love there's a tinge of bitter. In true love. My teacher used to say 'all love is bittersweet'. All things experienced fully, reveal their opposite. — Adyashanti

Birth is a bittersweet event ... a place where heaven and earth collide in a perplexing clash of hopes, dreams, facts, fears, questions, and expectations. — Debra Evans

He looked at her in bittersweet despair. "Sometimes, Kate, when I'm inside you and your arms are around me, I'm human again. There's a beginning and an end to my life again. And all because of your love. It's been a gift to me, one I've never deserved. But I cherished it."
And maybe he'd destroyed it with the ungodly truth. He didn't know. He drew
a shaky breath, battered by a fresh wave of regret, and his voice trembled. "I thought I had broken your heart a while ago. I didn't know how to make you hear me, and I knew that by telling you the truth, I'd lose you. But here you sit. You haven't flipped out, not visibly anyway, nor accused me of being a liar. And you haven't run in terror, now that you're truly free to go. I don't know what to think. Tell me, Kate ... have I lost you? — Shelby Reed

What I've discovered more recently is copies of books that I didn't represent, but that my boss represented when I assisted her on the dollar pile. I won't mention any names, but it is this profoundly bittersweet time of realizing, "Oh, I had a wonderful time working on this book and now it is a dollar relic on the side of the road." — John Hodgman

We wander in our thousands over the
face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the
seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me
that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.
We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends
those whom we
obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most
free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties,
even those for whom
home holds no dear face, no familiar voice,
even they have to meet the
spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its
valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees
a
mute friend, judge, and inspirer. — Joseph Conrad

Having more exposure is kind of a bittersweet thing for me, honestly, because it's nice to have a little more job security in life now. — Ani DiFranco

And there were times when one yielded quite shamelessly to the sentimental. They were more likely to be times of crickets, I think, than of birds - when it was impossible not to feel, like another essence of the sunlight, the bittersweet of life that lingers about old houses, and places where men have died, and things that forgotten hands have touched. — Harrison Gray Otis Dwight

On the one hand, I'm so relieved that I've actually managed to finish my very first series and that I've been able to see my characters through to the end of their journeys. On the other hand, I feel like how parents must feel when they send their kid off to college. It's a bittersweet mix. — Marie Lu

Darling, you know what they say. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince."
I give her a lopsided, bittersweet smile.
"I think I've kissed a prince, Mom. I hope he doesn't turn into a frog. — E.L. James

carrying laborer to teacher and manager. It seems a bittersweet result of the family's loss that the remaining children had managed to lift themselves out of poverty. — Saroo Brierley

Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still. — Donna Tartt

She smiled. She was happy, yet sad. Life had never been more bittersweet. She looked at the
sunset. The pink sky was sinking into the deep blue ocean. It was almost as if the sky knew
it was making a mistake, digging its own grave. But for a moment there, at the very moment
before diving into the darkness of the sea, on the golden horizon, the sky shone brighter
than it ever had. It was glorious in its five seconds of fame. It was serendipitously happy,
like all its life had led to that moment. And then it died into the sea, content. — Thisuri Wanniarachchi

I ... confirm the fact - with a certain bittersweet melancholy - that everything in the world brings me back to a quotation or a book. — Jorge Luis Borges

You'ld think I'ld be used to saying good bye to you by now. — Stephenie Meyer

Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Reaching the summit of K2 was an incredible experience, but I would trade it in a heartbeat to have Dan back. — Susan Oakey-Baker

Lord, admitting my accomplishments are your gift is a bittersweet thing to do. It stings at first because it humbles. But then it is so very sweet and brings such peace. It is not up to me, and it never was. Let me work hard, with this liberating insight removing the pressure I sinfully put on myself. Amen. — Timothy J. Keller

If there is an afterlife, I want my soul intact. And then maybe I'll see you there.I smiled, somehow calm now that I was facing something inevitable. I was getting the good-bye I'd always wanted. - Nikki — Brodi Ashton

Well, then, what's the plan now? You can't stay here forever.'

My plan was indeed to stay there forever. — Olivia Sudjic

How bittersweet it is, on winter's night,
To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire,
As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light,
Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir. — Charles Baudelaire

You're impossible." I sighed. "And really weird. No wonder Jared likes you."
"Is that a good thing or not?"
I shrugged. "You two have bittersweet panty-dropping connection."
"Gross. — Rea Lidde

Leaving the space station was bittersweet - I had been there for a long time and looked forward to leaving, but it is a remarkable place. — Scott Kelly

Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one. — Michael Chabon

I don't want to just go to the playoffs, I don't want to go to the playoffs and win the first round, second round, and not win the whole thing because it's bittersweet. — Allen Iverson

Unhappily we have to pay in life for everything worthwhile. If we want experience, depth and an understanding of life's infinite phases we have to suffer shock and sorrow and then, if we are strong enough to rise above them, life is a curious bittersweet affair. Too much of its bitter aspect is of course terrible, but too much of unalloyed sweetness can also be bad enough. — Pamela Hicks

Bittersweet: it's what life tastes like. And if you can handle the bitter, the sweet will come later. ~ Klyde, in Piranhas Like S'mores. — J.Z. Bingham

It's a bittersweet road we parents travel. We start with total commitment to a small, helpless human being. Over the years we worry, plan, comfort, and try to understand. We give our love, our labor, our knowledge, and our experience - so that one day he or she will have the inner strength and confidence to leave us. — Adele Faber

He touches my bottom lip, leaving behind a smear of fruity glaze. He watches as I suck away the bittersweet residue, then he licks the rest of the glaze from his fingertip. At the appearance of his tongue, heat blossoms in my face.
He smirks. "Look at that. I revived the color in your cheeks." — A.G. Howard

I envy the music lovers hear. I see them walking hand in hand, standing close to each other in a queue at a theater or subway station, heads touching while they sit on a park bench, and I ache to hear the song that plays between them: The stirring chords of romance's first bloom, the stately airs that whisper between a couple long in love. You can see it in the way they look at each other ... you can almost hear it. Almost, but not quite, because the music belongs to them and all you can have of it is a vague echo that rises up from the bittersweet murmur and shuffle of your own memories. — Charles De Lint

Life is "heavy" is it not? However, we lighten it with our love of it ... and I have found that whether returned or no ... that love is always worth it. It is the loving that is the gift of life, and whether bittersweet from loss, or returned in another's eyes, we are blessed to have had its presence in our lives ... — Gloria Smith

I believe love is bittersweet, especially young love. — Aurora Guerrero

A child was a temptation of the flesh, as well as of the spirit; I knew the bliss of that unbounded oneness, as I knew the bittersweet joy of seeing that oneness fade as the child learned itself and stood alone.
But I had crossed some subtle line. Whether it was that I was born myself with some secret quota embodied in my flesh, or only that I knew my sole allegiance must be given elsewhere now ... I knew. As a mother, I had the lightness now of effort completed, honor satisfied. Mission accomplished. — Diana Gabaldon

Would 'sorry' have made any difference? Does it ever? It's just a word. One word against a thousand actions. — Sarah Ockler

There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction ... no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time. — Irvine Welsh

There's always a bittersweet kind of thing, but I feel like everything had to work out the way it is. Everything that had to happen, happened. — Bruno Mars

I would stay away from him and leave him to go his own road where there would be other women, countless other women, who would probably give him as much physical pleasure as he had had with me. I wouldn't care, or at least I told myself that I wouldn't care, because none of them would ever own him - own any larger piece of him than I now did. — Ian Fleming

I realize then, what my mother already knows - has known for a long time. Motherhood is a procession of goodbyes. Some bittersweet and filled with promise and hope, some gradual, a gentle prying away of your fingers from something precious, some more violent, unexpected. — Heather Gudenkauf

In [man's] mouth is ever the bittersweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never tell. — Hope Mirrlees

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space. — Anne Carson

her words filled John with a bittersweet — Mona Prevel

And you find some way to survive
And you find out you don't have to be happy at all..
To be happy you're alive. — Brian Yorkey

When we are fully mindful of the transience of things - an impending return home from an overseas adventure, a graduation, our child boarding the school bus for the first day of kindergarten, a close colleague changing jobs, a move to a new city - we are more likely to appreciate [be grateful for] and savor the remaining time that we do have. Although bittersweet experiences also make us sad, it is this sadness that prompts us, instead of taking it for granted, to come to appreciate the positive aspects of our vacation, colleague, or hometown; it's 'now or never.' — Sonja Lyubomirsky

The bittersweet about truth is that nothing could be more hurtful, yet nothing could be more helpful. — Mike Norton

Apart from the most obvious cases, like the Oriental Bittersweet vine, escaped from private gardens and smothering the mountains one acre at a time, the most painful proof of man's destruction is not what you can see right in front of you; it's what you will never see again. — Wil S. Hylton

But homegirl don't know jack about hockey! — Sarah Ockler

There is cruelty in divorce. There is cruelty in forced or unfortunate marriage. We will continue to cry at weddings because we know how bittersweet, how fragile is the truth. We will always need legal divorce just as an emergency escape hatch is crucial in every submarine. No sense, however, in denying that after every divorce someone will be running like a cat, tin cans tied to its tail: spooked and slowed down. — Anne Roiphe

Just before Jie and Daniel reached the street, Daniel stopped. He twirled around and gazed up at me, as if he had sensed my eyes on his back. He strode a few steps toward me, paused, and then strode two more.
He slung off his cap and pressed it to his chest. Then,with the casual grace that marked all of his movements, he dropped to one knee and bowed his head.
He was declaring fealty to his empress.
I laughed-I couldn't help it. The absurdity of it all. The bittersweet sting.When he lifted back up, I saw he too wore a smile.He waved with his cap, and after flopping it back on his head, he swiveled and trotted to the street. Then,without another look back, the Spirit-Hunters left. — Susan Dennard

No fairy tale, this. This was by no stretch of the imagination a polished fantasy. This was a searing, living force, rough around the edges, unfamiliar and bittersweet.
And precious. — V.S. Carnes

I ain't scared to lend a hand
I ain't scared to clench it either — Mie Hansson

September is a sweep of dusky, purple asters, a sumac branch swinging a fringe of scarlet leaves, and the bittersweet scene of wild grapes when I walk down the lane to the mailbox. September is a golden month of mellow sunlight and still clear days ... Small creatures in the grass, as if realizing their days are numbered, cram the night air with sound. Everywhere goldenrod is full out. — Jean Hersey

Reckoner
Reckoner
You can't take it with you
Dancing for your pleasure
You are not to blame for
Bittersweet distractor
Dare not speak its name
Dedicated to all you
all human beings
Because we separate like
ripples on a blank shore
(in rainbows)
Because we separate like
ripples on a blank shore
(in rainbows)
Reckoner
Take me with you
Dedicated to all you
all human beings — Radiohead

The girl must be looking for another hot-fudge shower, Ellen said. Then she, too, advanced on Leesha. — Cinda Williams Chima

She stooped to pick a wild pink rose, avoiding the tiny spines that slivered like unseen glass hairs onto one's fingers. There was little scent, but the creamy softness of the petals like the insides of a dog's ear more than made up for it. She placed one on her tongue, and imagined she could taste the hills, the bittersweet tang of life. — Jonis Agee

There are probably a dozen perfect happy endings you could write. And a thousand bittersweet ones, and at least a million that are gloriously tragic. Alas, you only get to pick one. — Scott Westerfeld

i have laughed
more than daffodils
and cried more than June. — Sanober Khan

That's the bittersweet joy of ministry. We see people healed, and then we watch them move on in victory. Sometimes, it means saying goodbye. We must learn to celebrate as our fledgling birds spread their wings and fly into freedom, even if that flight pattern takes them far away from us. — Katherine J. Walden

At my age, you not only have bittersweet memories, you make bittersweet plans. — Robert Breault

There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. I used to feel it coming out of the movies just before dinnertime, after the matinee. How, I wondered, did Broadway actors face it, this bittersweet sense of time's slipping past. — Jacquelyn Mitchard

And like my comrades, I too have
tasted the bittersweet
assurance that I
would be okay with myself.
And like so many others
out there, I have given that
dream away to the wind
and its power over the trees. — A.P. Sweet

Memories, even bittersweet ones, are better than nothing. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

If this is victory, then our hands are too small to hold it. — J.R.R. Tolkien

leave me some music
that's chocolate
for the heart. — Sanober Khan

Three, 300, or 3,000 - these are the number of unknown days, a week, a year, or a decade, each far too precious little and yet, poignantly too much at the same time, to see an irrevocably declined loved one languish and suffer. That fear-ridden, irreversible release lingers in the doorway, but hesitates for reasons we don't understand, leaving us to weep with a mixture of angst and gratitude all at the same time. It is finally ushered all the way in, to comfort and carry our loved one to that Better Place. When the time finally comes, we can be enveloped in a warm cloak of long-awaited acceptance and peace that eases our own pain. It quiets the grief which has moaned inside of us, at least some, every single one of those bittersweet days, weeks... or years. — Connie Kerbs

We feel a kind of bittersweet pricking of malicious delight in contemplating the misfortunes of others. — Michel De Montaigne

The honeymoon was taking place in the bittersweet mysteries of Indian Summer in New England. — Kurt Vonnegut

So it really does have a sort of bittersweet quality. Kids like to have adventures and to believe they can fly, but there's also that fear about people leaving you. — Cathy Rigby

How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is. — Albert Camus

I thought of our time together, of how brief and bittersweet it was. I didn't tell you something important, then. I guess it's too late now, but it's something that occurred to me only after we parted ways. I thought--when I was with you, I was content to just sit back and enjoy the ride, as it were, because the ride was so pleasant. And maybe that was the problem. — Luis Joaquin M Katigbak

Coffee and love taste the same, bittersweet! — Saravana Kumar Murugan

Bittersweet is kind of my own favourite style because I want to be able to cry to the same song that I also can laugh to. — Aino Jawo

... love born of the worst kind of loss, of knowing you could lose, and of the sobering knowledge that these cherished moments they chose to grasp this night were stolen from the hands of time. — Susan Rodgers

My style of comedy is very real and bittersweet, and sort of always on the verge of kind of being tragic. — Paul Feig