Bittersweet Quotes

“We should strive to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“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 the University of Nevada clinical psychologist D. Steven Hayes put it in a Psychology Today article he wrote called "From Loss to Love." "In your pain you find your values, and in your values, you find your pain.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“...your relationship will be an asymptote of the thing you long for. As LVL says, "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

“When LVL finally speaks, it's of many things, but especially of what Sufis call "the journey". This, he says, is his deepest interest, and really there are three of them. The first journey is from God - the journey where you forget that you ever had a divine union in the first place... The second, of remembrance, is the moment of grace in which "you begin to look for the light. You look for prayers and practices to help you. In the West, this is known as spiritual life. Many techniques have come from East to West to help you connect with soul. Every human has his own way of prayer and glorification. And you need to find a spiritual teacher." The final journey is in God - you're taken "deeper and deeper into the divine mystery.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Longing is the sweet pain of belonging to God he (LVL) writes. Once longing is awakened within the heart it is the most direct way Home.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“bittersweet types despair that the perfect and beautiful world is forever out of reach. But at their best, they try to summon it into being.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“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

“Homesick we are, and always, for another And different world. —VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, THE GARDEN”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“We’re not combatants, call the violinists; we’re not victims, either, add the violas. We’re just humans, sing the cellos, just humans: flawed and beautiful and aching for love.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604) spoke about compunctio, the holy pain[,] the grief somebody feels when faced with that which is most beautiful….The bittersweet experience stems from human homelessness in an imperfect world, human consciousness of, and at the same time, a desire for, perfection. This inner spiritual void becomes painfully real when faced with beauty. There, between the lost and the desired, the holy tears are formed. —OWE WIKSTRÖM, PROFESSOR IN PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF UPPSALA AUTHOR’S NOTE When I wrote this book, I always meant for my story—my great love, loss, and reunion with my mother—to be the opening chapter.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“The longing comes through Yahweh or Allah, Christ or Krishna, no more and no less than it comes through the books and the music; they are equally the divine, or none of them are the divine, and the distinction makes no difference; they are all it.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Yet the moonlight sonatas of the world don't simply discharge our emotions; they elevate them. Also, it's only sad music that elicits exalted states of communion and awe. Music conveying other negative emotions, such as fear and anger, produces no such effect. Even happy music produces fewer psychological rewards than sad music, concluded Sachs, Damasio, and Habibi. 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

“If you define transcendence as a moment in which your self fades away and you feel connected to the all, these musically bittersweet moments are the closest I've come to experiencing it. But it's happened over and over again.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“People grow from failure. They grow from adversity. They grow from pain.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in —L. C., “ANTHEM”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole