#bitter

When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains. Therefore if you find that, despite all the efforts to forgive, your anger and bitterness cannot subside, you may need to look deeper and ask, ‘What am I defending? What is so important that I cannot live without?’ It may be that, until some inordinate desire is identified and confronted, you will not be able to master your anger. ↗

— Timothy Keller

#bitterness #forgiveness #happiness #idolatry #security

I envied these women I saw before me, their beauty still intact. Life has its revenge of life. Untimely death is the secret of eternal youth. ↗

— Shan Sa

#eternal-youth #immortality #beauty

Acid filled Sara’s mouth. It wasn’t fair. That’s what Sara wanted to say. To scream at the top of her lungs. It just wasn’t fair. Lena wasn’t strong. She would bend, not break. She would recover from this tragedy the same easy way she recovered from every other tragedy before. Even if she lost Jared, Lena would always know what it felt like to have his child growing inside of her. She could always hold her baby’s hand and think of holding Jared’s. She could see her child laugh and learn and grow and play sports and do school projects and graduate from college and Lena would always, always remember her husband. She would see Jared in her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. On her deathbed, she would find peace in the knowledge that they had made something beautiful together. That even in death, they would both go on living. “Sara,” Faith said. “What’s happening here?” Sara wiped her eyes, angry that she was back in the same dark place she’d started at this morning. “Why does everything come so damn easy to her?” She struggled to speak. Her throat clenched around every word that wanted to come out of her mouth. “Everything just opens up, and she always walks through unscathed and—” Sara had to stop for breath. “It’s just so easy for her. She always has it so goddamn easy. ↗

— Karin Slaughter

#jealousy #women-helping-women #beauty

It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet. ↗

— David Herbert Lawrence

#body #difficult #exacting #into #live

I feel extremely lucky, extremely grateful, and a little bittersweet, too. ↗

— Wentworth Miller

#extremely #feel #grateful #i #i feel

It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. ↗

— Barack Obama

#bitter #cling #explain #frustrations #get

Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous. ↗

— David Ogilvy

#advertising #been #bitter #cannot #consumer

If you can play guitar and sing, you can probably get a gig down the road playing at a restaurant, but don't throw your life away chasing something that is so elusive it will only lead you to regret and may turn you bitter. ↗

— Cliff Richard

#bitter #chasing #down #down the road #elusive

I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges. ↗

— Richard Russo

#against #already #always #any #been

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit. ↗

— William Makepeace Thackeray

#bitterness #deceit #only #real #reality