Bittersweet Quotes

“There’s an unspectacular mundane suffering that pervades the workplace,” Kanov told me. “But we don’t feel allowed to acknowledge that we suffer. We endure way more than we should, and can, because we downplay what it’s actually doing to us.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Americans, it turns out, smile more than any other society on earth. In Japan, India, Iran, Argentina, South Korea, and the Maldives, smiling is viewed as dishonest, foolish, or both, according to a study by Polish psychologist Kuba Krys.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Endings will give way to beginnings just as much as beginnings give way to endings. Your ancestor’s life ended, and yours could begin. Yours will come to an end, and your child’s story will take center stage. Even within the course of your life, pieces of you will constantly die off—a job will be lost, a relationship will end—and, if you’re ready, other occupations, loves, will arise in their place. What follows may or may not be “better” than what came first. But the task is not only to let the past go, but also to transform the pain of impermanence into creativity—and transcendence.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“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

“Philip Muskin told The Atlantic magazine, “Creative people are not creative when they’re depressed.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“yearning melodies help our bodies to achieve homeostasis—a state in which our emotions and physiologies function within optimal range. Studies even show that babies in intensive care units who listen to (often mournful) lullabies have stronger breathing, feeding patterns, and heart rates than infants hearing other kinds of music!”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“An important first step is to cultivate humility. We know from various studies that attitudes of superiority prevent us from reacting to others’ sadness—and even to our own. “Your vagus nerve won’t fire when you see a child who’s starving,” says Keltner, “if you think you’re better than other people.” Amazingly, high-ranking people (including those artificially given high status, in a lab setting) are more likely to ignore pedestrians and to cut off other drivers, and are less helpful to their colleagues and to others in need.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“We tend to place compassion on the “positive” side of the ledger of human emotions, notwithstanding this decidedly bittersweet view of it as the product of shared sorrow.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“These findings have enormous implications. They tell us that our impulse to respond to other beings’ sadness sits in the same location as our need to breathe, digest food, reproduce, and protect our babies; in the same place as our desire to be rewarded and to enjoy life’s pleasures. They tell us, as Keltner explained to me, that “caring is right at the heart of human existence. Sadness is about caring. And the mother of sadness is compassion.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“But Keltner also found the compassionate instinct in the more instinctive and evolutionarily ancient parts of our nervous system: in the mammalian region known as the periaqueductal gray, which is located in the center of the brain, and causes mothers to nurture their young; and in an even older, deeper, and more fundamental part of the nervous system known as the vagus nerve, which connects the brain stem to the neck and torso, and is the largest and one of our most important bundles of nerves. It’s long been known that the vagus nerve is connected to digestion, sex, and breathing—to the mechanics of being alive. But in several replicated studies, Keltner discovered another of its purposes: When we witness suffering, our vagus nerve makes us care. If you see a photo of a man wincing in pain, or a child weeping for her dying grandmother, your vagus nerve will fire.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Upbeat tunes make us want to dance around our kitchens and invite friends for dinner. But it's sad music that makes us want to touch the sky.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering—or find someone who makes it for you. And if you do find yourself drawn to such a person, ask yourself why they call to you. What are they expressing on your behalf—and where do they have the power to take you?”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Everything is broken, everything is beautiful—everything, including love.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“...after all the grief and loss and disruption, you are still--you always will be--exactly who you are.”
― 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 bot these truths at the same time.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Those who let their eyes adjust can see in the darkness.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“If you score above 5.7, you’re a true connoisseur of the place where light and dark meet.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“It doesn’t matter whether we consider ourselves “secular” or “religious”: in some fundamental way, we’re all reaching for the heavens.”
― 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.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“But even so” connects us with everyone who’s ever grieved, which is to say: everyone.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“But even so: For kids as well as for grown-ups, three words that unite us with everyone who’s ever lived.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“If you do return to your birth country, it will be as a stranger, and you may find that the lemon groves whose scent is still so fragrant in your memory have been paved into parking lots.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“kvelling. It means “bursting with pride and joy for someone you love,”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“what orients a person to the bittersweet is a heightened awareness of finality.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“One of the cornerstones of Keltner’s research, which he summarized in his book Born to Be Good, is what he calls “the compassionate instinct”—the idea that we humans are wired to respond to each other’s troubles with care. 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.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“disenfranchised griefs”?”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Words will not lighten a heavy heart,”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“If the joy of connecting to others is important to you, what are you going to do with the pain of being misunderstood or failing to understand others?”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“One: These losses shape your psyche; they lay down patterns for all your interactions. If you don’t understand them and actively work to form new emotional habits, you’ll act them out again and again. They’ll wreak havoc on your relationships, and you won’t know why. There are many ways to confront them, some of which we’re exploring in this book. Two: No matter how much therapeutic work you do, these may be your Achilles’ heels for life: maybe a fear of abandonment, a fear of success, a fear of failure; maybe deep-seated insecurity, rejection sensitivity, precarious masculinity, perfectionism; maybe hair-trigger rage, or a hard nub of grief you can feel like a knot protruding from your otherwise smooth skin. Even once you break free (and you can break free), these siren songs may call you back to your accustomed ways of seeing and thinking and reacting. You can learn to block your ears most of the time, but you’ll have to accept that they’re always out there singing. 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

“Endings will give way to beginnings just as much as beginnings give way to endings. Your ancestor’s life ended, and yours could begin. Yours will come to an end, and your child’s story will take center stage. Even within the course of your life, pieces of you will constantly die off—a job will be lost, a relationship will end—and, if you’re ready, other occupations, loves, will arise in their place. What follows may or may not be “better” than what came first. But the task is not only to let the past go, but also to transform the pain of impermanence into creativity—and transcendence”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole