Bitterness

“The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.”

“I wouldn't call it bitter. I think it's just sweet. I've always believed my life seems like it's gotten better and better as each decade has gone by. So I don't see any I don't see any bitterness about it.”

“A gorilla does not budge from a banana thrown at it by a monkey.”

“When you got right down to it, my dick was the one organ that hadn’t presented itself to my consciousness through pain, only pleasure. Modest but robust, it had always served me faithfully. Or, you could argue, I had served it – if so, its yoke had been easy. It never gave me orders. It sometimes encouraged me to get out more, but it encouraged me humbly, without bitterness or anger. This past evening, I knew, it had interceded on Myriam’s behalf. It had always enjoyed good relations with Myriam, Myriam had always treated it with affection and respect, and this had given me an enormous amount of pleasure. And sources of pleasure were hard to come by. In the end, my dick was all I had.”

“If you keep your heart open, that same pain can become a purifying pain, a strengthening pain. If we choose forgiveness over bitterness, that pain can heal instead of hurt. Instead of a pain that divides, it can be a pain that binds. Instead of a pain that breaks us down, it can be a pain that builds us up.”

“She became fascinated by the statue of Edith Cavell and would stand at the base of it in the freezing cold of a December morning, looking up: -Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone-. Sometimes those words made her cry. The tears would come uncontrollably and they would not stop. And in those moments Anna found forgiveness and it made her free. But they were only moments. Forgiveness is a hard thing to hang on to.”

“Boy, you're good at figuring things out. Isn't he? Except that if anybody's the devil in this room it's _you_, buster." An extraordinary bitterness came into his face. "I've seen you before. I know you, all right, preacher man. Age after age, you come back. You always lead the crusades. You're so damned golden-tongued, other people just flock to die for your causes. You die with them, it's true, because you're stupid enough to believe your own great lies; but you always come back again somehow. Oh, I know _you_.”

“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.”

“Most complain about dried up lawns; others envy a neighbor's green lawn, but winners learn from all lawns while cultivating their own.”

“The choice to remain unhappy because of your hurts, pains and miseries by hanging on to them or live happily by forgiving and moving on is yours. There are lots of times that you may have felt that injustice had been done to you, that you were kind to someone who in return turned out to be ungrateful, that you loved with all your heart giving it all that you had but what you got in return was a broken heart and broken dreams, in short life has been very unfair to you. Right? So what do you want to do? Hang on to those miserable thoughts and moments? Will it help in any way? Are you going to get justice, will your heart be the same once again? Get real. Hanging on to bitter memories will only harm you because you will turn bitter and you will go crazy simply trying to deal with this accumulated mound of misery. Choose instead to forgive, ignore and move on. Get rid of that excess baggage that you have been carrying in your heart all this while and you will suddenly feel lighter as if a huge stone has been lifted from your chest. Forgive quickly and unconditionally, that’s the best way forward. Don’t be tied down by bitterness and let it not ruin your life.”

“What is the destiny of man, but to fill up the measure of his sufferings, and to drink his allotted cup of bitterness?”

“The rich of this world will vanish like smoke, and no memory of their past pleasures will remain. But even in their lifetime they do not enjoy them without bitterness, weariness and fear, for the very things whence they derive their pleasures often carry with them the seeds of sorrow.”

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”

“I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone.”

“You can spread joyfulness in any place of bitterness.”

“It is unbelievable the amount of hate the human body can sustain before it begins to break.”

“If failure has the strength to turn your life into bitterness itself, then patience has the strength to turn your life into the sweetest joy. Do not surrender to fate after a single failure. Failure, at most, precedes success.”

“Much like humans, opinions come in all shapes and forms, but in the end, they are just what they are; and may yet still be categorized in nature. The first you might say is the Indoctrinal, which is, of course, dictated by community and necessity, by the human need for acceptance; secondly, there is the Personal, and this is often dictated by individuality, by the yearning to seem interesting and intelligent, or free, or special; and lastly comes the Emotional. This is most commonly dictated by circumstance and bitterness and excitement. However, rarely do we find the case in which any of these are dictated by reason in the pure state: it is by this we see that at the core of a number of false opinions lies not always misinformation but quite often some issue of the human self.”

“If you don’t take care of the disenfranchised and outcasts of your city, they will come knocking on your door one day with revenge and bitterness”

“Bitterness and resentment are a bottomless well. They can only be healed by the phenomenon of someone else's sorrow rising to your level of pain... it never happens - save yourself endless hurt.”