Bittersweet Quotes

“Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Instead, it may be more useful to view creativity through the lens of bittersweetness—of grappling simultaneously with darkness and light. It’s not that pain equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Every laugh we share, every touch, is a reminder to me that reality can, indeed, change. From trauma rises the soul, incandescent and perfect. It was always there, waiting to be embraced…. The best way to heal yourself? Heal others. I don’t believe we can escape our past. My brother and mother tried it, and it didn’t work. We have to make friends with sadness. We have to hold our losses close, and carry them like beloved children. Only when we accept these terrible pains do we realize that the path across is the one that takes us through.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“My favorite musician, Leonard Cohen, said that his favorite poet, García Lorca, taught him that he was “this aching creature in the midst of an aching cosmos, and the ache was okay. Not only was it okay, but it was the way that you embraced the sun and the moon.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“I love everything about life,” Breitbart says, his voice growing louder now. “Familial love, parental love, spousal love, lust. I love beauty, I love fashion, I love art, I love music, I love food, I love plays, I love drama, I love poetry, I love movies. There are very few things I don’t have an interest in. I love being alive.” He’s gesturing widely, at the window, at the pouring, driving rain. “But even with all these loves,” he says, “you’re born with a set of limitations: your genetic legacy, your time, your place, your family. I could have been born a Rockefeller, but I wasn’t. I could have been born into a family living in a remote tribe where I thought God was a blue elephant, but I wasn’t. You’re born into this reality: that life is full of dangers, it’s an uncertain place. Events occur—you have an accident, someone shoots you, you develop an illness. All sorts of things happen. You have to respond.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“We think we long for eternal life, but maybe what we’re really longing for is perfect and unconditional love; a world in which lions actually do lay down with lambs; a world free of famines and floods, concentration camps and Gulag archipelagos; a world in which we grow up to love others in the same helplessly exuberant way we once loved our parents; a world in which we’re forever adored like a precious baby; a world built on an entirely different logic from our own, one in which life needn’t eat life in order to survive.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“But his work implicitly rejects this outlook. “Expressive writing” encourages us to see our misfortunes not as flaws that make us unfit for worldly success (or otherworldly heaven), but as the seeds of our growth. Pennebaker found that the writers who thrived after pouring their hearts onto the page tended to use phrases such as “I’ve learned,” “It struck me that,” “I now realize,” and “I understand.” They didn’t come to enjoy their misfortunes. But they’d learned to live with insight.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Longing itself is divine,” writes the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. “Longing for worldly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. True longing brings up spurts of bliss.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Live as though all your ancestors were living again through you,” said the ancient Greeks.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Issa was one of Japan’s “Great Four” haiku masters. The heartbroken poet wrote of his inability to accept impermanence: “I concede that water can never return to its source, nor scattered blossoms to their branch, but even so the bonds of affection are hard to break.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“imagine what death would feel like, they mostly described sadness, fear, and anxiety. But their studies of terminally ill patients and death row inmates found that those actually facing death are more likely to speak of meaning, connection, and love. As the researchers concluded: “Meeting the grim reaper may not be as grim as it seems.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“What once was will never be again.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Love is the antidote to fear. Fear causes you to shrink and withhold; love opens you up.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Darwin is associated, in the popular imagination, with bloody zero-sum competition, with Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw”—with the motto “survival of the fittest.” But this wasn’t actually his phrase. It was coined by a philosopher and sociologist named Herbert Spencer and his fellow “social Darwinists,” who were promoters of white and upper-class supremacy. For Darwin, says Keltner, “survival of the kindest” would have been a better moniker. Darwin was a gentle and melancholic soul, a doting husband and adoring father of ten, deeply in love with nature from earliest childhood. His father had wanted him to be a doctor, but when at age sixteen he witnessed his first surgery, performed in those days without anesthesia, he was so horrified that for the rest of his life he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He retreated to the woodlands and studied beetles instead. Later, he described his encounter with a Brazilian forest as “a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“the onset of darkness is not the tragedy we imagine, but rather the prelude to light.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Human babies are, as Keltner puts it, “the most vulnerable offspring on the face of the Earth,” unable to function without the help of benevolent adults. We’re born this fragile to accommodate our enormous brains, which would be too big to fit through the birth canal if we arrived after they fully developed. But our “premature” birth date turns out to be one of the more hopeful facts about our species. It means that the more intelligent our species grew, the more sympathetic we had to become, in order to take care of our hopelessly dependent young. We needed to decipher their inscrutable cries. We needed to feed them, we needed to love them.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“The place you suffer is the place you care. You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“these phrases to repeat: 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.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Our difficulty accepting impermanence is the heart of human suffering.”
― 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. 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.fn2 This idea—of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love—is the heart of this book.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“What can we do other than try to remind one another that some things can’t be fixed, and not all wounds are meant to heal?” she continues. “We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion. That you can and will be sad, and happy; you’ll be grieving, and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“We’re drawn to the sublime domains, like music, art, and medicine, not only because they’re beautiful and healing, but also because they’re a manifestation of love,”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“But for a very long time, even after my life had moved on and even soared, even after I had a home of my own, a family of my own, in so many ways the vibrant life I’d dreamed of as a child, even then I couldn’t speak of my mother without tears. I couldn’t even say a simple thing like “my mother grew up in Brooklyn” without crying. For this reason, I learned not to speak of her at all. The tears felt unacceptable; it made no sense to grieve a mother who was still alive, even a mother as difficult as mine. But I couldn’t accept the chasm between the mother I remembered, who’d been my greatest companion, champion, and love, and the one I had now. Yet that childhood mother—if she’d ever existed in the first place—had walked away with the diaries I handed her on the final day of freshman year, and it was, for all intents and purposes, the last I ever saw of her.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“It is urgent to live enchanted. —VALTER HUGO MÃE”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“We all think what we think, feel what we feel, are who we are, because of the lives of the people who came before us, and the way our souls have interacted with theirs. Yet these are also our own, singular lives. We have to hold both these truths at the same time.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“I believe it’s because we intuit that, if pain endures transgenerationally, then so, too, could healing.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“The dominant experience is sadness,” explains Bonanno, in a podcast interview with Dr. David Van Nuys, “and there are also some other emotions….There’s anger, sometimes contempt, or shame, where people are having all kinds of memories and difficult experiences….So rather than this elaborate, steady state of months of deep sadness, it’s really much more of an in and out kind of an oscillatory state, and this sadness is punctuated at times by positive states and smiling, laughter and connection to other people.” For many people, says Bonanno, these “periods of sadness…gradually get less intense.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Just like a twenty-one-year-old, I’m still full of plans and ideas and excitement. But I have an acute consciousness, which I lacked fifteen years ago, that time is limited. This gives me no anxiety, at least not yet; but it does make me feel as if I should soak everything up while I still can. Carstensen told me that this was typical of midlife.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“If you’re a naturally bittersweet type, you have a head start; you’re constitutionally primed to feel the tug of impermanence. Another way to get there is simply to wait for middle age, which seems to carry some of the psychological benefits of aging without the downsides of your body falling apart.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“But the only thing that consoled them was when we said that the pain of goodbye is part of life; that everyone feels it; that they would feel it again. This would seem a depressing reminder, but it had the opposite effect. When children (especially those growing up in relative comfort) grieve a loss, they’re crying in part because we’ve unwittingly taught them a delusion—that things are supposed to be whole; that real life is when things are going well; that disappointment, illness, and flies at the picnic are detours from the main road.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole