Bittersweet Quotes

“Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet

“The third answer is the most difficult one to grasp, but it's also the one that can save you. The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it's always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“If we could honor sadness a little more, maybe we could see it—rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage—as the bridge we need to connect with each other. We could remember that no matter how distasteful we might find someone’s opinions, no matter how radiant, or fierce, someone may appear, they have suffered, or they will.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“the secret that our poets and philosophers have been trying to tell us for centuries, is that our longing is the great gateway to belonging.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“I don’t want my heart to be broken,” they say. Or, “I don’t want to fail.” “I understand,” Susan tells them. “But you have dead people’s goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“I’ve concluded that bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a quiet force, a way of being, a storied tradition—as dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential. It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.[*2]”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“This book is about the melancholic direction, which I call the “bittersweet”: a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. “Days of honey, days of onion,” as an Arabic proverb puts it.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Philosophers call this the “paradox of tragedy,” and they’ve puzzled over it for centuries. Why do we sometimes welcome sorrow, when the rest of the time we’ll do anything to avoid it?”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“We’re built to live simultaneously in love and loss, bitter and sweet.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“as Jazaieri observes, “There’s no empirical evidence to suggest that beating ourselves up will actually help us change our behavior; in fact, some data suggests that this type of criticism can move us away from our goals rather than towards them.” Conversely, the more gently we speak to ourselves, the more we’ll do the same for others. So the next time you hear that harsh internal voice, pause, take a breath—and try again. Speak to yourself with the same tenderness you’d extend to a beloved child—literally using the same terms of endearment and amount of reassurance that you’d shower on an adorable three-year-old.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“But longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning “to grow long,” and the German langen—to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Americans prioritize happiness so much that we wrote the pursuit of it into our founding documents, then proceeded to write over thirty thousand books on the subject, as per a recent Amazon search. We’re taught from a very young age to scorn our own tears (“Crybaby!”), then to censure our sorrow for the rest of our lives. In a study of more than seventy thousand people, Harvard psychologist Dr. Susan David found that one-third of us judge ourselves for having “negative” emotions such as sadness and grief.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Hayes and his colleagues have distilled these insights into seven skills for coping with loss. In more than a thousand studies over thirty-five years, they’ve found that the acquisition of this skill set predicts whether people facing loss fall into anxiety, depression, trauma, substance abuse—or whether they thrive. The first five skills involve acceptance of the bitter. First, we need to acknowledge that a loss has occurred; second, to embrace the emotions that accompany it. Instead of trying to control the pain, or to distract ourselves with food, alcohol, or work, we should simply feel our hurt, sorrow, shock, anger. Third, we need to accept all our feelings, thoughts, and memories, even the unexpected and seemingly inappropriate ones, such as liberation, laughter, and relief. Fourth, we should expect that sometimes we’ll feel overwhelmed. And fifth, we should watch out for unhelpful thoughts, such as “I should be over this,” “It’s all my fault,” and “Life is unfair.” Indeed, the ability to accept difficult emotions—not just observe them, not just breathe through them, but actually, nonjudgmentally, accept them—has been linked repeatedly to long-term thriving.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“The Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns found that helping people in need stimulates the same brain region as winning a prize or eating a delicious meal. We also know that depressed (and formerly depressed) people are more likely to see the world from others’ points of view and to experience compassion; conversely, high-empathy people are more likely than others to enjoy sad music.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Our nervous systems make little distinction between our own pain and the pain of others, it turns out; they react similarly to both. This instinct is as much a part of us as the desire to eat and breathe. The compassionate instinct is also a fundamental aspect of the human success story—and one of the great powers of bittersweetness.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“the quest to transform pain into beauty is one of the great catalysts of artistic expression.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“the oldest problem, the deepest dream—the pain of separation, the desire for reunion. That’s the nub of human heartache and desire, regardless of your religion, birth country, personality.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Poignancy, she told me, is the richest feeling humans experience, one that gives meaning to life—and it happens when you feel happy and sad at the same time. It’s the state you enter when you cry tears of joy—which tend to come during precious moments suffused with their imminent ending. When we tear up at that beloved child splashing in a rain puddle, she explains, we aren’t simply happy: “We’re also appreciating, even if it’s not explicit, that this time of life will end; that good times pass as well as bad ones; that we’re all going to die in the end. I think that being comfortable with this is adaptive. That’s emotional development.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring. Which is exactly the opposite of what most of us want to do. We want to avoid pain: to ward off the bitter by not caring quite so much about the sweet.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“We’re living, famously, through a time in which we have trouble connecting with others, especially outside our “tribes.” And Keltner’s work shows us that sadness—Sadness, of all things!—has the power to create the “union between souls” that we so desperately lack. •”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love. The idea of longing as a sacred and generative force seems very odd in our culture of normative sunshine. But it’s traveled the world for centuries, under many different names, taking many different forms.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“whether you long to ease the pain of your ancestors, or for a world in which life could survive without consuming other life; whether you yearn for a lost person, an unborn child, the fountain of youth, or unconditional love: These are all manifestations of the same great ache.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Those who search for intimacy with others are reacting to this longing. They think another human will fulfill them. But how many of us have actually ever been totally fulfilled by another person? Maybe for a while, but not forever. We want something more fulfilling, more intimate. We want God. But not everyone dares to go into this abyss of pain, this longing, that can take you there.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“We’re most passionate about that which we’re most denied, and these things manifest in the companies and teams we build. If you’ve been bullied, your whole life is trying to disprove the peers or family members who once tormented you. If you have deep insecurity, you might hire a lot of yes people.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“May I be free from danger. May I be free from mental suffering. May I be free from physical suffering. May I have ease of well-being. The idea is to wish these states first to yourself, then to an ever-widening circle of people: loved ones, acquaintances, the difficult people in your life, and then finally to all beings.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Home isn’t a place. Home is where that longing is, and you don’t feel good until you’re there.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole