Bittersweet Quotes

“The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“living in a bittersweet state, with an intense awareness of life’s fragility and the pain of separation, is an underappreciated strength and an unexpected path to wisdom, joy, and especially communion.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“As a citizen of the contemporary world of practicality, you know the right answer to such questions: Of course, you have no missing half. There’s no such thing as a soul mate. One person can’t satisfy all your needs. The desire for boundaryless, effortless, endless fulfillment will not only disappoint: It’s neurotic, immature. You should grow up, get over it.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“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. If this strikes you as hopelessly self-indulgent, remember that you’re not babying yourself, or letting yourself off the hook. You’re taking care of yourself, so that your self can go forth and care for others.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“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. “Depression deepens our natural empathy,” observes Tufts University psychiatry professor Nassir Ghaemi, “and produces someone for whom the inescapable web of interdependence…is a personal reality, not a fanciful wish.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Creative people are not creative when they’re depressed.” 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

“The cause of suffering is our attachment to craving (for wealth, status, possessive love, and so on) and to aversion (for example, to hurt feelings, discomfort, pain). Freedom (or nirvana) comes from extinguishing attachment, a process aided by practices such as mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation. In this nonattached ideal, longing seems a highly problematic condition. As one Buddhist website put it, “After a lot of training with the Buddha’s teachings, we tend to recognize longing as an unproductive mindstate and just move on from it to whatever is actually present.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“We need to accept that there is no partner who would understand the whole of us, who will share all of our tastes in large and small areas. Ultimately, it is always a percentage of compatibility we will only ever achieve. Let’s go back to Plato and kill, once and for all, as a group, his charming, but insane, love-destroying piece of naivety. WE HAVE NO SOUL MATE.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Loss is part of life; no household is free of it.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“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

“Wounded healers also appear in studies finding that mental health counselors personally affected by mental illness tend to be more engaged in their work.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“many people respond to loss by healing in others the wounds that they themselves have suffered. Angelou did this through writing, but the process takes many forms. Indeed, the “wounded healer,” a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung in 1951, is one of humanity’s oldest archetypes.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

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

“the linguistic origins of the word yearning: 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. 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. But “to open your heart to pain is to open your heart to joy,” as”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“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

“How should we live, knowing that we and everyone we love will die? Do we inherit the pain of our parents and ancestors, and if so, can we also transform that into a beneficent force?”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Whether you long for the partner who broke up with you, or the one you dream of meeting; whether you hunger for the happy childhood you’ll never have, or for the divine; whether you yearn for a creative life, or the country of your birth, or a more perfect union (personally or politically); whether you dream of scaling the world’s highest peaks, or merging with the beauty you saw on your last beach vacation; 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

“Homesick we are, and always, for another And different world.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“In this yogi-ridden age," Orwell had written (all the way back in 1949, before there was a yoga studio on every corner), "it is too readily assumed that 'non-attachment' is not only better...but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult... If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for 'non-attachment' is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work."

Stephen turned and looked me in the eye. "Loving someone means nothing if it doesn't mean loving some people more than others," he said. "And understanding that makes me better able to love. I understand there's a hierarchy. I love my students, but I absolutely love my own children more, and I Have no interest in training myself away from that. It's too strong. It's too far away from the heart of nature. And I want to feel that feeling utterly. I've often admired Buddhist ideas, but at the same time wondered what they really meant. Is it really, ultimately, a cold-hearted thing? When I first read that Orwell quote, it was like permission to be a person.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“I don't believe we can escape our past. 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

“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

“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.”
― 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."

At the heart of all these traditions is this pain of separation, the longing for reunion, and occasionally, the transcendent achievement of it.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“So many of us love tragic drama, rainy days, tearjerker movies. We adore cherry blossoms--we even hold festivals in their honor--preferring them to equally lovely flowers because they die young. (The Japanese, who love sakura flowers most of all, attribute this preference to mono no aware, which means a desired state of gentle sorrow brought about by "the pathos of things" and "a sensitivity to impermanence").”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“An elegant Italian woman, worldly, sophisticated. Francesca. At the end of World War II, she meets and marries an American soldier, moves with him to his small Iowan farm town of good people who bring carrot cakes to their neighbors, look after the elderly, and ostracize those who flout norms by, say, committing adultery. Her husband is kind, devoted, and limited. She loves her children.

One day her family leaves town for a week, to show their pigs at a state fair. She's alone in the farmhouse for the first time in her married life. She relishes her solitude. Until a photographer fro National Geographic knocks on the door, asking directions to a nearby landmark... and they fall into a passionate, four-day affair. He begs her to run away with him; she packs her bags.

Until, at the last minute, she unpacks them.

Partly because she's married, and she has children, and the town's eyes are on them all.

But also because she knows that she and the photographer have already taken each other to the perfect and beautiful world. And that now it's time to descend to the actual one. If they try to live in that other world for good, it will recede into the distance; it will be as if they'd never been there at all. She says goodbye, and they long for each other for the rest of their lives.

Yet Francesca is quietly sustained by their encounter, the photographer creatively renewed. On his deathbed years later, he sends her a book of images he made, commemorating their four days together.

If this story sounds familiar , it's because it comes from The Bridges of Madison County, a 1992 novel by Robert James Waller that sold more than twelve million copies, and a 1995 movie, starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, that grossed $182 million. The press attributed its popularity to a rash of women trapped in unhappy marriages and pining for handsome photographers.

But that's not what the story was really about.

In the frenzy after the book came out, there were two camps: one that loved it because the couple's love was pure and endured over the decades. The other camp saw this as a copout--that real love is working through challenges of an actual relationship.

Which was right?”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Sadness gives rise to compassion--for others, and for oneself. I become most clear when I'm engaged in suffering. Sadness is like a meditation on compassion. You have this burst of: There's harm there, there's need there. I think sadness is beautiful and sadness is wise.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“...well-being actually involves a subtle, dialectical interplay between positive and negative...”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Nonattachment is not against love, as is commonly conceived," says the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. "It's a higher form of love." Rather, it advises loving in a nonattached way.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“they won’t be there to see it). But those aren’t tears of sorrow, exactly; at heart, they’re tears of love.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole