dkwhatwdo > dkwhatwdo's Quotes

“Do we really want to be rid of our resentments, our anger, our fear? Many of us cling to our fears, doubts, self-loathing or hatred because there is a certain distorted security in familiar pain. It seems safer to embrace what we know than to let go of it for fear of the unknown.
(Narcotics Anonymous Book/page 33)”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“With each opportunity before me, God presented me with a choice. I could accept His offerings, His wisdom, His grace. Or I could choose to hold onto the pain, the anger and the resentment a little longer.”
― Sharon E. Rainey, Making a Pearl from the Grit of Life

“At the heart of all anger, all grudges, and all resentment, you'll always find a fear that hopes to stay anonymous.”
― Donald L. Hicks, Look into the stillness

“Pride and resentment are not indigenous to the human heart; and perhaps it is due to the gardener's innate love of the exotic that we take such pains to make them thrive.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“He wasn't, I realized when I read those scenes concerning Blair and myself, close to any of us-- except of course to Blair, and really not even to her. He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn't seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he'd shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all. But there was no point in being angry with him.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

“He continued to see inevitable events from the past as avoidable, long after they'd taken their course.”
― Hugh Howey, Wool Omnibus

“Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.
You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.
I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it.”
― Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

“But yester-night I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did:
For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
My own or others still the same
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems

“One cannot always keep an adder in one's breast to feed one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one's soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

“Here she was, harboring this pulsating lump of hatred burning in her stomach that had only gotten hotter and hotter in the years she had been robbed of a confrontation, an explanation, and yet still she did not have the courage to sink her knife right into Roma's chest, to get revenge in the only way she knew how.”
― Chloe Gong, These Violent Delights

“You and I are extremely alike. Sometimes people who are alike don’t get along too well. Qualities that other people would respect, they take for granted in each other, and qualities that they wish they could curb in themselves, seem magnified in the other person. It’s like looking into a hypercritical mirror.”
― J.W. Lynne, Above the Sky

“I never intended to disappoint you. You created a one sided promise I never agreed to. Note to self: A request is not an obligation. A one-side promise is the recipe for resentment.”
― Brian Schwartz

“I believe in han. There's no perfect English-language equivalent for this Korean emotion, but it's some combination of strife or unease, sadness, and resentment, born from the many historical injustices and indignities endured by our people. It's a term that came into use in the twentieth century after the Japanese occupation of Korea, and it describes this characteristic sorrow and bitterness that Koreans seem to possess wherever they are in the world. It is transmitted from generation to generation and defines much of the art, literature, and cinema that comes out of Korean culture.”
― David Chang, Eat a Peach

“How does a daughter know that she feels appropriately towards the woman who is her mother? Yes, it was difficult to know what to do with Mai, how to conceive her. I thought I hated her fawning, but what I see I hated is the degree of it. If she was fawning, she was not fawning enough. She diluted it with her spitefulness, the hopeless clawing of a small cornered spirit towards what was beyond it. And if she had spirit, it was not great enough, being shrunk by the bitterness of her temper.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not

“It is in connection with the deliberate effort of the skillful demagogue to weld together a closely coherent and homogeneous body of supporters that the third and perhaps most important negative element of selection enters. It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program — on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off — than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they," the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the great advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive program. The enemy, whether he be internal, like the "Jew" or the "kulak," or external, seems to be an indispensable requisite in the armory of a totalitarian leader.

That in Germany it was the Jew who became the enemy until his place was taken by the "plutocracies" was no less a result of the anticapitalist resentment on which the whole movement was based than the selection of the kulak in Russia. In Germany and Austria the Jew had come to be regarded as the representative of capitalism because a traditional dislike of large classes of the population for commercial pursuits had left these more readily accessible to a group that was practically excluded from the more highly esteemed occupations. It is the old story of the alien race's being admitted only to the less respected trades and then being hated still more for practicing them. The fact that German anti-Semitism and anticapitalism spring from the same root is of great importance for the understanding of what has happened there, but this is rarely grasped by foreign observers.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

“When a man's pride is made to bite the dust, resentment is the worm that eats his flesh”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom

“He's a pitiful soul. Gentle, frail, the least likely to protest. In a nation of hairy men, Father stands out like a sleek adolescent boy. For years, his hair was thin and wispy, then, in one year, gone. He couldn't even keep the hair on top of his head.”
― Michael Benzehabe, Persianality

“My brother buried his resentment that day. But resentment buried is not gone. It is like burying a seed: for a season it may stay hidden in the dark, but in the end, it will always grow. I did not see it, though we were still close, even at that age. I think now that to be close to someone can be to underestimate them. Grow too close, and you do not see what they are capable of; or you do not see it in time.”
― Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister

“Resentment is an emotion based on some kind of a bond, and its next stages are feelings of unfamiliarity and indifference.”
― Ch'oe Yun, Mannequin

“The willingness to rebel from the expected norms, rules, and silent contracts of establishment comes out of knowing that one cannot afford to build resentment. Resentment, which comes from the decision to go against one's truth, embitters the self. It somaticizes in the body and takes on the burden of pain as if it were ours alone. The whistleblower, on the other hand, reveals a shared complicity. It says, "I expect more from myself and from you." And in that stance, the pain becomes, in a sense, communal.”
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

“A shrink once told me that an expectation is a resentment waiting to be born.”
― John Verdon, Shut Your Eyes Tight

“Anger, resentment, jealousy, desire for revenge, lust, greed, antagonisms, and rivalries are the obvious signs that I have left home. And that happens quite easily. When I pay careful attention to what goes on in my mind from moment to moment, I come to the disconcerting discovery that there are very few moments during the day when I am really free from these dark emotions, passions and feelings.

Constantly falling back into an old trap, before I am even fully aware of it, I find myself wondering why someone hurt me, rejected me, or didn't pay attention to me. Without realizing it, I find myself brooding about someone else's success, my own loneliness, and the way the world abuses me. Despite my conscious intentions, I often catch myself daydreaming about becoming rich, powerful, and very famous. All of these mental games reveal to me the fragility of my faith that I am the Beloved One on whom God's favor rests. I am so afraid of being disliked, blamed, put aside, passed over, ignored, persecuted, and killed, that I am constantly developing strategies to defend myself and thereby assure myself of the love I think I need and deserve. And in so doing I move far away from my father's home and choose to dwell in a "distant country.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming

“It is not a surprise that there are people we love and hate at the same time.
Not as though we hate them, but we hate how they don't love us.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Some of us fail to find the good in the bad because resentment is a shortcut to resolution.”
― Jamie George, Poets and Saints: Eternal Insight, Extravagant Love, Ordinary People

“But I could feel resentment inside me, and I knew it would keep growing until it changed into something far more dangerous.”
― Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned

“FORKED BRANCHES


We grew up on the same street,
You and me.
We went to the same schools,
Rode the same bus,
Had the same friends,
And even shared spaghetti
With each other's families.


And though our roots belong to
The same tree,
Our branches have grown
In different directions.
Our tree,
Now resembles a thousand
Other trees
In a sea of a trillion
Other trees
With parallel destinies
And similar dreams.
You cannot envy the branch
That grows bigger
From the same seed,
And you cannot
Blame it on the sun's direction.
But you still compare us,
As if we're still those two
Kids at the park
Slurping down slushies and
Eating ice cream.



Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine.

What the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all too plainly with the novelist's eye: namely, that as modern society becomes more organized and hence more bureaucratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface are monsters of frustration and resentment.”
― William Barrett

“We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn't matter.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club