Bittersweet Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Bittersweet. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.
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John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
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Experience life in all possible ways -- good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter. Experience all the dualities. Don't be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.
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Osho
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Memories, even bittersweet ones, are better than nothing.
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Jennifer L. Armentrout (Onyx (Lux, #2))
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It's not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What's hard, she said, is figuring out what you're willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.
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Joanne Harris (Chocolat (Chocolat, #1))
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Would 'sorry' have made any difference? Does it ever? It's just a word. One word against a thousand actions.
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Sarah Ockler (Bittersweet)
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Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Complete Poems)
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Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.
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Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)
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Now that I have opened that bottle of memories they're pouring out like wine, crimson and bittersweet.
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Ellen Hopkins (Impulse (Impulse, #1))
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I've spent most of my life and most of my friendships holding my breath and hoping that when people get close enough they won't leave, and fearing that it's a matter of time before they figure me out and go.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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Once again love drives me on, that loosener of limbs, bittersweet creature against which nothing can be done.
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Sappho
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Bittersweet? No, just bitter, the taste of your tongue. Words you can’t have back, so they linger.
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Coco J. Ginger
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To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
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Anne Carson (Eros the Bittersweet)
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Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top.
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Sarah Vowell
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There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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She is an able negotiator and a strong ally." Pickering said, as his eyes caressed her lovely face.Β  He noticed both her arms were wrapped tightly around Victor's, and that she looked up at him with such commitment that it made his cynical view of love soften.Β  Reminding him bittersweetly of how he had felt once, a very long time ago.
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Barbara Sontheimer (Victor's Blessing)
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It takes forty muscles to frown, and only twelve to jam a cupcake in your mouth and get over it.
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Sarah Ockler (Bittersweet)
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Eros, again now, the loosener of limbs troubles me, Bittersweet, sly, uncontrollable creature….
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Sappho
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Everybody has a home team: It’s the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. It’s the people who, near or far, know everything that’s wrong with you and love you anyways. These are the ones who tell you their secrets, who get themselves a glass of water without asking when they’re at your house. These are the people who cry when you cry. These are your people, your middle-of-the-night, no-matter-what people.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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The bittersweet about truth is that nothing could be more hurtful, yet nothing could be more helpful.
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Mike Norton (Just Another War Story)
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It tore my heart out, because I heard his voice. The wolves sang slowly behind him, bittersweet harmony, but all I heard was Sam. His howl trembled, rose, fell in anguish. I listened for a long time. I prayed for them to stop, to leave me alone, but at the same time I was desperately afraid they would. Long after the other voices had dropped away, Sam kept howling, very soft and slow. When he finally fell silent, the night felt dead.
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Maggie Stiefvater (Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1))
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We sometimes choose the most locked up, dark versions of the story, but what a good friend does is turn on the lights, open the window, and remind us that there are a whole lot of ways to tell the same story.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
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Anne Carson (Eros the Bittersweet)
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I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed- why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.
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Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)
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How cyclical and bittersweet for a child to retrace the image of their mother. For a subject to turn back to document their archivist.
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Michelle Zauner (Crying in H Mart)
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The bittersweetness of uncertainty: To win or to lose.
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Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
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I'd always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing. But I was wrong. Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn't the absence of everything you lost - it was the combination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn. - Florence Day
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Ashley Poston (The Dead Romantics)
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i have laughed more than daffodils and cried more than June.
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Sanober Khan
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And the flavor of Pippa's kiss--bittersweet and strange--stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
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Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
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How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is.
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Albert Camus (Notebooks 1935-1942)
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Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper. I didn’t want to write these pages until there were no hard feelings, no sharp ones. I do not have that luxury. I am sad and angry and I want everyone to be alive again. I want more landmarks, less landmines. I want to be grateful but I’m having a hard time with it.
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Richard Siken
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...sometimes the happiest ending isn't the one you keep longing for, but something you absolutely cannot see from where you are.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don't lose yourself at happy hour, but don't lose yourself on the corporate ladder, either.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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When things fall apart, the broken pieces allow all sorts of things to enter, and one of them is the presence of God.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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There will be other lives. There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters' unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands. And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecision and revisions. And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles. And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk. And there will be other lives for a man you don't recognize, for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything. Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human's life is a beautiful mess.
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Gabrielle Zevin (Elsewhere)
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One of the things that we were trying to do with this show was the complexities of relationships and love. There is both passion and longing and a bittersweet quality to it that is a part of life.
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Tim Burton (Tim Burton's Corpse Bride: An Invitation to the Wedding)
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There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time.
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Irvine Welsh (Porno (Mark Renton, #3))
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Bittersweet October. The mellow, messy, leaf-kicking perfect pause between the opposing miseries of summer and winter.
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Carol Bishop Hipps
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It's a good story,' he said. He even grinned at me. 'I'll tell you.' 'Please,' I said. And then he did.
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Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
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But once in a while, you pick the right thing, the exact best thing. Every day, the moment you open your eyes and pull off your blankets, that's what you hope for. The sunshine on your face,warm enough to make you heart sing.
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Sarah Ockler (Bittersweet)
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I believe that suffering is part of the narrative, and that nothing really good gets built when everything's easy. I believe that loss and emptiness and confusion often give way to new fullness and wisdom.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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And you’ll smile at this man and wonder if he too, like all those who came before him, will someday be a bittersweet memory, will someday be felled by the same foolish blunder of knowing you a little too well and yet also somehow not enough.
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Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory)
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...I live with regrets - the bittersweet loss of innocence - the red track of the moon upon the lake - the inability to return and do it again...
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John Geddes (A Familiar Rain)
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My life is a story about who God is and what He does in a human heart.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between β€˜I love you’ and β€˜I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.
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Anne Carson (Eros the Bittersweet)
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Halfway down the aisle, Jamie suddenly seemed to tire, and they stopped while she caught her breath...It was, I remembered thinking, the most difficult walk anyone ever had to make. In every way, a walk to remember.
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Nicholas Sparks (A Walk to Remember)
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Love is just as much suffering as it is sweetness. If it was perfect, that's what they'd all it. They wouldn't call it bittersweet.
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Nicole Williams (Clash (Crash, #2))
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As time passes, the day will come when everything will fade to memories. But those miraculous days, when you and I, along with everyone else, searched together for just that one thing, will continue revolving forever somewhere deep in my heart, as my bittersweet memory.
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Chica Umino
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I think preparing food and feeding people brings nourishment not only to our bodies but to our spirits. Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honoring our own createdness and fragility.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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When I die,' I said to my friend, 'I'm not going to be embalmed. I'm going to be dipped.' Milk chocolate or bittersweet was the immediate concern.
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Adrianne Marcus
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I've never met a problem a proper cupcake couldn't fix.
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Sarah Ockler (Bittersweet)
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Finishing a book is bittersweet. You spend days getting to know the characters. Learning their nuances, their faults, their loves, their lives. They become your friends, acquaintances, enemies. And after the story ends, you miss them. You look for them in your own life, wonder where they’ve gone, you forget that they aren’t real. You fall in love with the hero and dream of him at night. The strange girl becomes your best friend. Their heartaches become your heartaches. You laugh when they laugh. And cry when they die. Eventually you realise they aren’t a part of your world, you were just briefly visiting theirs.
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Whimsical Enlightenment
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It’s the Longing that ultimately undoes you. When it finds you, it gnaws at your bones and tugs at your chest. It fills you up inside like rot and makes you dream dreams and it drowns you. The Longing keeps you in bed, clutching at your sheets while the world goes on outside. It smells like old leaves and cigarette smoke, mixed with the scent of far-off places you will hear of, but never see. It’s the gloss on a lover’s lips the moment you realize you will never kiss those lips again. It is the bittersweet, unrequited love of creation and it will break your heart again and again and again. If you know the Longing the way I do, then these words are redundant. We understand each other perfectly, you and I.
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Matthew Sturges (House of Mystery, Volume 1: Room and Boredom)
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People are not rain or snow or autumn leaves; they do not look beautiful when they fall.
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Naveed A. Khan
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When I desire you a part of me is gone.
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Anne Carson (Eros the Bittersweet)
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Not all love stories are written the same way. Ours had torn chapters, missing paragraphs, and a bittersweet ending.
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L.J. Shen (Broken Knight (All Saints High, #2))
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If this is victory, then our hands are too small to hold it.
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J.R.R. Tolkien (The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3))
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Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.
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Alain de Botton (Essays in Love)
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What ever happened to creativity? What ever happened to the passion? What ever happened to speaking ones mind? I'll tell you what happened. The kids aged, but never grew up. A baby can whine if it does not like something because it doesn't know better. What's your excuse? Stop getting offended whenever the wind blows your hair the wrong way! We will get nowhere if we continue to avoid truths to avoid offense. Speak your mind and do not be afraid of stepping on toes. The truth can be ugly, and that's what makes it so beautiful. Speak your mind, but don't take this as a chance to lose respect either. Always keep respect. If someone then still claims to be offended, it is not because of you, nor is it your fault. They simply don't like the taste of the bittersweet truth.
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Caitlyn Paige
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If there is an afterlife, I want my soul intact. And then maybe I'll see you there."I smiled, somehow calm now that I was facing something inevitable. I was getting the good-bye I'd always wanted. - Nikki
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Brodi Ashton (Everneath (Everneath, #1))
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If anyone tells you a song is important to them, you should turn it up loud, close your eyes, and really listen . Because at the end, you will know that person so much better. Unknown
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Kate Stewart (Drive (The Bittersweet Symphony Duet #1))
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Because music is the heart’s greatest librarian. A few notes had the ability to transport me back in time, and to the most painful of places. Take any song from the Rolodex of your life, and you can pin it to a memory.
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Kate Stewart (Drive (The Bittersweet Symphony Duet #1))
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I'm not sure if you even want me around or if you just feel sorry for me. I'm not sure of anything.
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Sarah Ockler (Bittersweet)
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Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.
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Charlotte BrontΓ« (Jane Eyre)
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The grandest seduction of all is the myth that DOING EVERYTHING BETTER gets us where we want to be. It gets us somewhere, certainly, but not anywhere worth being.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.
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Anne Carson (Eros the Bittersweet)
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Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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We can get used to just about anything but it doesn't mean it's okay
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Sarah Ockler (Bittersweet)
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Everyone says that the internet is so awesome because you can connect with people from all over the world, but I think it’s the opposite. The internet doesn’t make it easier to connect with anyoneβ€”it just makes it so you don’t really have to.
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Sarah Ockler (Bittersweet)
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It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard, she said, is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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I'm thinking of how unexpected and yet oddly preordained life can be. Events are upon you in an instant, unforseen and without warning, and often times marked with disappointment and tragedy, but equally often leading to a better understanding of the bittersweet truth of life.
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Rob Lowe (Stories I Only Tell My Friends)
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Grace isn’t about having a second chance; grace is having so many chances that you could use them through all eternity and never come up empty. It’s when you finally realize that the other shoe isn’t going to drop, ever.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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Many of the most deeply spiritual moments of my life haven't happened just in my mind or in my soul. They happened while holding my son in the middle of the night, or watching the water break along the shore, or around my table, watching the people I love feel nourished in all sorts of ways.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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For she is a fair maiden, fairest lady of a house of queens. And yet I know not how I should speak of her. When I first looked on her and perceived her unhappiness, it seemed to me that I saw a white flower standing straight and proud, shapely as a lily, and yet knew that it was hard, as if wrought by elf-wrights out of steel. Or was it, maybe, a frost that had turned its sap to ice, and so it stood, bitter-sweet, still fair to see, but stricken, soon to fall and die? - Aragorn about Γ‰owyn
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J.R.R. Tolkien (The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3))
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Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.
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Susan Cain (Bittersweet)
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Love doesn’t die, even when you stop feeding it. There is no expiration date on the ache of missing someone you shared your heart, life, and body with.
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Kate Stewart (Drive (The Bittersweet Symphony Duet #1))
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I envy the music lovers hear. I see them walking hand in hand, standing close to each other in a queue at a theater or subway station, heads touching while they sit on a park bench, and I ache to hear the song that plays between them: The stirring chords of romance's first bloom, the stately airs that whisper between a couple long in love. You can see it in the way they look at each other... you can almost hear it. Almost, but not quite, because the music belongs to them and all you can have of it is a vague echo that rises up from the bittersweet murmur and shuffle of your own memories.
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Charles de Lint (Moonlight and Vines (Newford, #6))
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Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulsesβ€”I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortableβ€”your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungersβ€”and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves. Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor fleshβ€”hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper.
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Richard Siken
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Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.
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Susan Cain (Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole)
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No matter what happens next, I'm not letting this turn into another two weeks of silence, the entire history of us summed up in a series of near misses and almosts just because neither of us had the snowballs to say anything.
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Sarah Ockler (Bittersweet)
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Wounds heal. Scars fade. Awful memories can be overwritten with better ones if given the chance. The little imperfections of our psyches become overshadowed by the people whose love we cherish because they cherish us despite our faults; physical, emotional, spiritual, or otherwise. This thing we call the human condition with all its bittersweet blind corners and senseless humor evolves from within ourselves and not because of some pre-ordained reverie we desire to cast in the constellations. All in all it is what makes life worth living.
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August Clearwing (Never Have I Ever)
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Abby's my sister, Hudson. We're twins." "Oh thank God! I mean thank God... that you... have a sister... what a special... um, napkin?
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Sarah Ockler (Bittersweet)
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Oh we're a mess, poor humans, poor fleshβ€”hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We've been to the moon and we're still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It's two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I'd know it was something true. Now I'm trying to dig deeper.
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Richard Siken
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All the little quirks that make even the most barren, frigid places beautiful, that make a tiny gray dot on the map the one place you'll always call home, no matter where your glamorous, boring, adventurous, average, ridiculous, impossible, epic, romantic, bacon-infused life leads you.
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Sarah Ockler (Bittersweet)
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A penny for my thoughts, oh no, I'll sell them for a dollar They're worth so much more after I'm a goner And maybe then you'll hear the words I been singin' Funny when you're dead how people start listenin
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Kimberly Perry (If I Die Young: Piano/Vocal/Guitar (Original Sheet Music Edition))
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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.
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Susan Cain (Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole)
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When you're out here alone, contemplating all the things you didn't do and the person you didn't become ... if you think about it too long a hush seeps into the gray space, and the wind will hollow out your bones, and the purest kind of loneliness comes up from the inside to swallow you like an avalanche.
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Sarah Ockler (Bittersweet)
β€œ
She bent forward to look, then gave a startled little cry and drew back. There was indeed a seed lying in the palm of his hand, but it was shaped exactly like a long, sharply-pointed thorn… β€˜The seed looks very sharp,’ she said shrinkingly. ’Won’t it hurt if you put it into my heart?’ He answered gently, β€˜It is so sharp that it slips in very quickly. But, Much-Afraid, I have already warned you that Love and Pain go together, for a time at least. If you would know Love, you must know pain too.’ Much-Afraid looked at the thorn and shrank from it. Then she looked at the Shepherd’s face and repeated his words to herself. ’When the seed of Love in your heart is ready to bloom, you will be loved in return,’ and a strange new courage entered her. She suddenly stepped forward, bared her heart, and said, β€˜Please plant the seed here in my heart.’ His face lit up with a glad smile and he said with a note of joy in his voice, β€˜Now you will be able to go with me to the High Places and be a citizen in the Kingdom of my Father.’ Then he pressed the thorn into her heart. It was true, just as he had said, it did cause a piercing pain, but it slipped in quickly and then, suddenly, a sweetness she had never felt or imagined before tingled through her. It was bittersweet, but the sweetness was the stronger. She thought of the Shepherd’s words, β€˜It is so happy to love,’ and her pale, sallow cheeks suddenly glowed pink and her eyes shown. For a moment Much-Afraid did not look afraid at all.
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Hannah Hurnard (Hinds' Feet on High Places)
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Perhaps you know someone whose heart clutches onto the bittersweet memory of the one who got away. Someone who secretly bears the weight of this imperceptible burden wherever he or she goes, every day of his or her life. Someone who’d gladly travel back in a time machine to a day when paths diverged, to mend together that which has been torn apart, setting destiny back on its rightful track β€” if only he or she could. Perhaps you know this someone better than you think. And should this someone happen to be you, may you find strength and support in the millions of others who shoulder this burden with you, and may you be reintroduced one day to true love… in this lifetime and whatever comes after.
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Sebastian Cole (Sand Dollar: A Story of Undying Love)
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Just before Jie and Daniel reached the street, Daniel stopped. He twirled around and gazed up at me, as if he had sensed my eyes on his back. He strode a few steps toward me, paused, and then strode two more. He slung off his cap and pressed it to his chest. Then,with the casual grace that marked all of his movements, he dropped to one knee and bowed his head. He was declaring fealty to his empress. I laughed-I couldn't help it. The absurdity of it all. The bittersweet sting.When he lifted back up, I saw he too wore a smile.He waved with his cap, and after flopping it back on his head, he swiveled and trotted to the street. Then,without another look back, the Spirit-Hunters left.
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Susan Dennard (Something Strange and Deadly (Something Strange and Deadly, #1))
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I know now that I can make it through more than I thought, with less than I thought. I know better than to believe that the changes are over, and I know better than to believe the next ones will be easier, but I've learned the hard way that change is one of God's greatest gifts and one of his most useful tools.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now. I suppose life always ends badly for almost everybody. We must have long fingers and catch at whatever we can while it is passing near us.
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Tennessee Williams (Notebooks)
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Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
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Anne Carson (Eros the Bittersweet)
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Perhaps our dreams are there to be broken, and our plans are there to crumble, and our tomorrows are there to dissolve into todays, and perhaps all of this is all a giant invitation to wake up from the dream of separation, to awaken from the mirage of control, and embrace whole-heartedly what is present. Perhaps it is all a call to compassion, to a deep embrace of this universe in all its bliss and pain and bitter-sweet glory. Perhaps we were never really in control of our lives, and perhaps we are constantly invited to remember this, since we constantly forget it. Perhaps suffering is not the enemy at all, and at its core, there is a first-hand, real-time lesson we must all learn, if we are to be truly human, and truly divine. Perhaps breakdown always contains breakthrough. Perhaps suffering is simply a right of passage, not a test or a punishment, nor a signpost to something in the future or past, but a direct pointer to the mystery of existence itself, here and now. Perhaps life cannot go 'wrong' at all.
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Jeff Foster
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A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.
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Anne Carson (Eros the Bittersweet)
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That’s the thing about intimacy and truly knowing the person you’re with. They always know when something’s off, no matter how casually you try to sweep your unease away. They know. It’s their job, because in the song of your life, they are the ones listening. It’s when they stop that you need to worry. He’d listened to mine. He knew when a beat was missing, or a note was forgotten. He’d memorized my song, and I was his favorite.
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Kate Stewart (Drive (The Bittersweet Symphony Duet #1))
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Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of reality. That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet -- or bitter-sweet -- poison from childhood onwards. But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation. They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into 'hostile life'. We may call this 'education to reality. Need I confess to you that the whole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?
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Sigmund Freud (The Future of an Illusion)
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I believe deeply that God does his best work in our lives during times of great heartbreak and loss, and I believe that much of that rich work is done by the hands of people who love us, who dive into the wreckage with us and show us who God is, over and over and over. There are years when the Christmas spirit is hard to come by, and it’s in those seasons when I’m so thankful for Advent. Consider it a less flashy but still very beautiful way of being present to this season. Give up for a while your false and failing attempts at merriment, and thank God for thin places, and for Advent, for a season that understands longing and loneliness and long nights. Let yourself fall open to Advent, to anticipation, to the belief that what is empty will be filled, what is broken will be repaired, and what is lost can always be found, no matter how many times it’s been lost.
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Shauna Niequist (Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)
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My Sabine, I just left your room. You were so beautiful lying there sound asleep that I couldn’t bear to wake you. But I’m not feeling so great and there are things I promised to tell you that I fear I may not get the chance to. I know you had once hoped that I would be the one to pass on your letters to Maddie once you were gone. But, as it turns out, I think it is going to be me who ends up leaving the letters behind. Be mad at me. You should. But after that try to understand that I did what I thought was best. I wanted to tell you. So many times I snuck down to your room planning on telling you everything, but I just couldn’t. Partly it was for you – yes. You needed time and I didn’t want to influence your choices, even once I realised what was happening between us, even more so then. Falling in love with you only made those choices more complicated and I feared that you might choose to stay for me and then, after I was gone, change your mind. I couldn’t let that happen. Partly the choice was selfish, and for that I am sorry. For so long now people have been trying to fix me, but where they failed, you succeeded. You’ve given me more life in the last couple of weeks that I’ve had in years. Being with you, loving you, making memories with you, fearing for you, wanting to show you the beauty of life instead of the terror – it was bittersweet, but more importantly Sabine, it was real. I know this is the part when I beg you to go on, live your life and be happy. But I don’t need to say those things. I know you. Your lives will be extraordinary. You certainly made mine feel that way. Please find it in your heart to forgive me one day. I wish we had more time, but I want to thank you – for giving me life in my time of death. My love for you is eternal. Ethan.
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Jessica Shirvington (Between the Lives)