Bittersweetness Quotes

“I want each day to last forever . . . It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past. Even in the midst of a pleasurable outing I'm aware of how ephemeral it is.”
― Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World

“From the stage Ben catches my eye. "This is for them, Taylor," he calls out as they begin to play. It's a song by the Waterboys and, like each time I hear the music played by the boy in the tree in my dreams, I experience a bittersweet sense of nostalgia I have no right to own. When it's time for Ben to play his solo–his eyes closed, his mind anywhere but here, his fingers so taut and precise that it almost looks painful–my eyes well with tears. Because you know from the look on Ben's face that he's somewhere you want to be. Somewhere the five would be each time they were together.”
― Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road

“Beyoncé spins her own bittersweet narratives into art. “I’ma rain, I’ma rain on this bitter love/Tell the sweet I’m new,” she sings on “Freedom.”
As bell hooks writes of Beyoncé’s Lemonade in her essay “Moving Beyond Pain,” to be truly free, we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity, we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal well-being and joy. In that world, the making and drinking of lemonade will be a fresh and zestful delight, a real life mixture of the bitter and the sweet, and not a measure of our capacity to endure pain, but rather a celebration of our moving beyond pain.”
If Will Cotton’s paintings—- resplendent with pure, idealized fantasy—- are the sweetness we lazily dream of, Walker’s A Subtlety is the sweetness we actually live: rearing up through centuries of hurt and exploitation, planting its feet in the good and the bad, the pleasure and the pain. It crystallizes across the surfaces of our imperfect lives, and makes us shine.”
― Samin Nosrat, The Best American Food Writing 2019