“This was the only shame he felt. And this shame was so great in him that he wondered if all his life thereafter would be long enough to wash out of his brain and blood and the last pollution of its loathsome taint. And yet, he would have it thought that he was bitter.”
“Ever since I realized there waz someone callt/
a colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag/
i been tryin not to be that & leave bitterness/
in somebody else’s cup...”
“...beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.”
″[A plant] is a meaningless decoration. It sits there consuming time and resources, and then one day it decides to die, no matter how much you watered it. It’s absurd to attach an emotion to something so brief and pointless.”
“The only one who had not lost for a single minute the awareness that [Rebeca] was alive and rotting in her wormhole was the implacable and aging Amaranta. […]Always, at every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought about Rebeca because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.”
“Úrsula, on the other hand, who had suffered through a process opposite to Amaranta’s, recalled Rebeca with a memory free of impurities, for the image of the pitiful child brought to the house with the bag containing her parents’ bones prevailed over the offense that had made her unworthy to be connected to the family tree any longer.”
“yet all this while I liv’d uncomfortably, by reason of the constant Apprehensions I was in of their coming up on me by Surprize; from whence I observe, that the Expectation of Evil is more bitter than the Suffering, especially if there is no room to shake off that Expectation, or Apprehensions.”
“A thousand girls would sell their own mothers to be in your shoes, and yet here you are, miserable and sulking like a child. So tell me, girl. What is your sad little heart pining for?”
“I drew back, startled. “You don’t want to be doing this.” “This is the only thing I want to be doing,” he growled, and I could hear the bitterness and desire all tangled up in his voice. ”
“You sense my loneliness, (...) my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I’m evil, that I don’t deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals.”
“If it were Gregor, he would have realized long ago that it isn’t possible for human beings to live with such a creature, and he would have gone away of his own free will. Then we wouldn’t have a brother, but we’d be able to go on living and honor his memory. But as things are, this animal persecutes us, drives the roomers away, obviously wants to occupy the whole apartment and for us to sleep in the gutter.”
“Bitterness isn’t usually found most deeply in those whose hearts are hard but rather in those who are most tender. It’s not that they are cold; it’s that they’ve been made to feel unsafe.”
″ ‘Why it’s gone!’ she said sadly, feeling once more just to make sure. The loose tooth was really and truly gone. The salty mud from her fingers tasted bitter, and she made a bitter-tasting face that was almost a face like crying.”