I Am Bitter Quotes

“The Land of Civilian was a dry bitter place where you sat in your car staring at drawn curtains and closed doors for hours on end, and where everything was a big, freaking secret.”

— Lily Gardner

“Friendships fail some years,
blight twists the leaves and the crop is bitter.
Frost bites or sudden fire devours:
but the root lies sound and waits for better weather or a storm of sleet to scour the branches.
Then we shall see another spring:
a flare of green flame and flowers burning to fruit along the boughs.”

— Charlotte Gray

“In the long run - everyone is different, but we are all human. Everyone deserves love no matter what they look like, everyone needs faith in their life, hope in their heart, and love to give for otherwise life will be terrible. Everyone makes mistakes, NO ONE is perfect (yes that means YOU reading this and it means ME as well). I believe we all need to be more accepting, less judgmental, more loving, less bitter, and more willing to look past the flaws at the person inside.”

— Megan Wilson

“Fools, their wisdom weak,
are their own enemies
as they go through life,
doing evil
that bears
bitter fruit.”

— Juan Mascaró

“I lost the ability to fear and panic. Instead I felt practical and causal. I had never known time to pass so acutely before. I sat out through the night with the patrol, watching the bitter glow of stars overhead, listening as the season exhaled and the layers of vegetation shrugged and compressed, like the ashes of burnt wood. On the hills I was aware of every corporeal moment, every cycle of light. I felt every fibre of myself conveying energy, and I understood that it was finite, that the chances I had in life would not come again.”

— Sarah Hall

“There was no portion of land in the world with so contradictory a nature as the Highlands. Now it was a land of sunlit moors stained red with heather, knowing only the peace of the quiet sky and the heart-shaking beauty of the blue hills; now it was a harsh and awesome place where silent mists obscured the peaks and a bitter relentless rain came down from bitter skies, where an angry sea washed against the shore, and sullen clouds reflected in sullen gray lochs.
Scotland in the sun and Scotland in the rain ...”

— Jan Cox Speas

“Thus Betty scraped through a second bitter crisis, one that might have shattered a character more brittle. But she had grown sharp as bile from this, her latest shock, and each passing day increased her edge. Worse, there was no one now to notice her shrinking humanity and cry halt ... by turns she would become lightheaded, cackling away like one insane. It was the lightness of one who has nothing more to lose.”

— Eddie Lenihan

“Men Wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

— Ernest Shackleton

“A bitter thing cannot be made sweet.
The taste of anything can be changed.
But poison cannot be changed into nectar.”

— B.R. Ambedkar

“It is a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures. Once you leave your birthplace nothing is ever the same.”

— Sarah Turnbull

“I died on a bitter cold night. Beneath a black sky and a bruised winter moon, I tried to fly, hoping my arms might act as wings.”

— Jennifer Archer

“His voice is muddy, that's what it is. Dark and brown and muddy. A note to it like coffee left too long on the burner. And unsweetened, bitter chocolate. But there's dirt in it too, deep, dark dirt, like the garden in October.”

— Jael McHenry

“My thoughts hovered over all varieties of mortal edible, and finally settled on a porterhouse steak and a quart of bitter with a welsh rabbit to follow. In longing hopelessly for these dainties I fell asleep.”

— John Buchan

“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

“There was something extraordinarily sweet and comfortable about a friend who knows you and accepts you at your worst, your most bitter, or defeated, who sees your emotional ugliness naked and is not afraid to call it by name, and yet does not turn from you or allow you to cease to struggle, who wills your survival as precious.”

— Anne Perry

“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy's hatred, the greater his need of love. Be his enmity political or religious, he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus but unqualified love. In such love there is not inner discord between the private person and official capacity. In both we are disciples of Christ, or we are not Christians at all.”

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“For surely the food that memory gives to eat is bitter to the taste, and it is only with the teeth of hope that we can bear to chew it. (Ayesha)”

— H. Rider Haggard

“There are some situations which men understand by instinct, by which reason is powerless to explain; in such cases the greatest poet is he who gives utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed as if they listened to an entire poem, and when th sufferer is sincere they are right in regarding his outburst as sublime.”

— Alexandre Dumas

“As I'm always fond of telling hosts at the Oscars who are doing it for their first time, for everybody who wins, there are four people who don't. As the evening wears on, the room fills up with losers, and then they are bitter.”

— Bruce Vilanch

“Each one, then, should love his life, even though it be not very attractive, for it is the only life. It is a boon that will never return and that each person should tend and enjoy with care; it is one's capital, large or small, and can not be treated as an investment like those whose dividends are payable through eternity. Life is an annuity; nothing is more certain than that. So that all efforts are to be respected that tend to ameliorate the tenure of this perishable possession which, at the end of every day, has already lost a little of its value. Eternity, the bait by which simple folk are still lured, is not situated beyond life, but in life itself, and is divided among all men, all creatures. Each of us holds but a small portion of it, but that share is so precious that it suffices to enrich the poorest. Let us then take the bitter and the sweet in confidence, and when the fall of the days seems to whirl about us, let us remember that dusk is also dawn.”

— Rémy De Gourmont

“Taking a remorseful satisfaction in the snowy walk and bitter wind.”

— Louisa May Alcott

“I am bitter sometimes but the taste has often been sweet.”

— Charles Bukowski

“How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!”

— Albert Camus

“Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!”

— Honore De Balzac

“According to then current laws of war, the besieged could make terms if they surrendered, but not if they forced a siege to its bitter end, so presumably Charles felt no compunctions.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

“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.”

— D.H. Lawrence

“She glared at him, feeling the old frustration. Sometimes in his presence she felt the deepest connection to him, and other times she felt completely alone-as though any bond to him was her own bitter imagination.”

— Ann Brashares

“I learned a long time ago, if you want to keep your friends in show business, don't get famous. Because as soon as you get famous, a lot of the people you used to know, who didn't, become incredibly bitter and jealous. It's part of the territory.”

— Denis Leary

“All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were to true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.”

— Edward Abbey

“Sweet or bitter, I am now convinced that all experience is enriching and rewarding. Above all, instructive.”

— Henry Miller

“And then he knew that war is no good, because vanquishing a man is as bitter as being vanquished.”

— Albert Camus

“There is an utterance of Necessity, an ancient decree of the gods, eternal, sealed fast with broad oaths: whenever any one defiles his body sinfully with bloody gore or perjures himself in regard to wrong-doing, one of those spirits who are heir to long life, thrice ten thousand seasons shall he wander apart from the blessed, being born meantime in all sorts of mortal forms, changing one bitter path of life for another.”

— Empedocles

“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

“Now, when you boys get home, you're gonna see a lot of war protestors. But don't be bitter. Go up to one, shake his hand, and smile. Then wink at his girlfriend, because she knows she's dating a pussy.”

— Tommy Franks

“God can take the good, bad and the bitter and create a masterpiece called your destiny.”

— Tony Evans

“We should learn from children not to hold grudges. Children often fight when they play together but they quickly make up and their fights don't deteriorate into bitter feuds.”

— Joseph Wechsberg

“Don't get bitter, just get better.”

— Justin Johnson

“You've got to take the sour with the bitter.”

— Samuel Goldwyn

“I consider Otto Rank to be one of the great spiritual giants of the twentieth century, a genius as a psychologist and a saint as a human being. Though vilified by his original community of Freudians, he never became bitter. He died a feminist and deeply committed to social justice, in 1939 ... His deep understanding of creativity makes him a mentor for all of us living in a postmodern world ... I believe that Art and Artist, especially chapters 12 to 14, may well emerge as the most valuable psychoanalysis of the spiritual life in our time.”

— Matthew Fox

“Fly from wrath; sad be the sights and bitter fruits of war; a thousand furies wait on wrathful swords.”

— Edmund Spenser

“And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer
apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“God has given us speech in order that we may say pleasant things to our friends, and tell bitter truths to our enemies.”

— Heinrich Heine

“If it's bitter at the start, then it's sweeter in the end.”

— Madonna Ciccone

“We must thoroughly clear away all ideas among our cadres of winning easy victories through good luck, without hard and bitter struggle, without sweat and blood.”

— Mao Zedong