Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.

Sweetness of life depends to its bitterness.

What makes bitter things sweet? Hunger.

Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

All this grows bitter that was once so sweet, And many mouths must drain the dregs of it. But none will pity me, nor pity him Whom Love so lashed, and with such cruel thongs.

I shall but love thee bitter after death

Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites,
Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.

Indolence is sweet, and its consequence bitter.

Night, I have discovered, has a faintly bitter taste, caused by its large ingredient of Un-attained Possibility.

But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.

When I liked something I tasted it hesitantly, furtively, as though it were extremely bitter.

We prefer to cling to bitterness, but bitterness is corrosive. Like a container filled with salt, it will destroy everything because the Lord cannot forgive us if we cannot forgive others. Life is wonderful if we let God heal us.

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry,
Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!

The first pressure of sorrow crushes out from our hearts the best wine; afterwards the constant weight of it brings forth bitterness, — the taste and stain from the lees of the vat.