Resentment Quotes

“Most friendships are a sort of frozen and undeveloping semi-hostility.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Anger is a forward-looking emotion, rooted in the idea that there should be change. Resentment, on the other hand, is locked in the past and usually generates no meaningful difference in the situation.”
― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

“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

“Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But then in sex he lost his awkwardness. He shows his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life. It wasn't something learnt, I suspected, from the guys before me who'd picked him up and fucked him and fucked him around. It was a kind of gift for giving, and while he did whatever I wanted it emerged as the most important thing there was for him. It was all the harder, then, when the resentment returned and I longed for him to go.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

“Gratitude: Only when people remember the good others have done for them will they have gratitude. Unfortunately, however, most people remember the bad people have done to them far longer than the good. Or to put it another way, gratitude takes effort; resentment is effortless.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Exodus

“She resented the way in which he walked in and out of her mind as if it was his own flat.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“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

“Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes they mean it. They're compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution

“I felt rising frustration and resentment. I was frustrated because I felt stuck, and I was resentful because I was stuck in an industry that was chipping away at so many things I cared about.”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“Hatred is that corrosive emotion that erodes a hole in my soul large enough to hold a grudge. And if holding a grudge requires a space that’s made like that, I can’t afford the grudge nor the hatred that creates the space for it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“And so, by means both active and passive, he sought to repair the damage to his self-esteem. He tried first of all to find ways to make his nose look shorter. When there was no one around, he would hold up his mirror and, with feverish intensity, examine his reflection from every angle. Sometimes it took more than simply changing the position of his face to comfort him, and he would try one pose after another—resting his cheek on his hand or stroking his chin with his fingertips. Never once, though, was he satisfied that his nose looked any shorter. In fact, he sometimes felt that the harder he tried, the longer it looked. Then, heaving fresh sighs of despair, he would put the mirror away in its box and drag himself back to the scripture stand to resume chanting the Kannon Sutra.

The second way he dealt with his problem was to keep a vigilant eye out for other people’s noses. Many public events took place at the Ike-no-o temple—banquets to benefit the priests, lectures on the sutras, and so forth. Row upon row of monks’ cells filled the temple grounds, and each day the monks would heat up bath water for the temple’s many residents and lay visitors, all of whom the Naigu would study closely. He hoped to gain peace from discovering even one face with a nose like his. And so his eyes took in neither blue robes nor white; orange caps, skirts of gray: the priestly garb he knew so well hardly existed for him. The Naigu saw not people but noses. While a great hooked beak might come into his view now and then, never did he discover a nose like his own. And with each failure to find what he was looking for, the Naigu’s resentment would increase. It was entirely due to this feeling that often, while speaking to a person, he would unconsciously grasp the dangling end of his nose and blush like a youngster.

And finally, the Naigu would comb the Buddhist scriptures and other classic texts, searching for a character with a nose like his own in the hope that it would provide him some measure of comfort. Nowhere, however, was it written that the nose of either Mokuren or Sharihotsu was long. And Ryūju and Memyoō, of course, were Bodhisattvas with normal human noses. Listening to a Chinese story once, he heard that Liu Bei, the Shu Han emperor, had long ears. “Oh, if only it had been his nose,” he thought, “how much better I would feel!”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

“One last point here, and I’ll give you this as a caveat. When Carefree Scamps let their guard down and find themselves telling others about their life, they’re invariably not believed. To a Carefree Scamp, his/her life is just normal talk. To a Rag, Tag & Bobtail, who hasn’t yet lived, it’s unbelievable. When I was living on the Algarve I once had someone say to me, “Is there anywhere you haven’t been? You reckon you’ve lived here for two or three years, and you were also in America for eight years, travelling around America for five years. Where else have you lived?”

And I experienced that not uncommon feeling that I should have kept my mouth shut. Clearly jealous, because although spending 12 years in Portugal and America is hardly exceptional, the Rag Tag wanted desperately to disbelieve that I’d made it happen. But as I say, it’s not exactly notable, is it? I hadn’t told him I’d travelled with a circus for 15 years, or explored the Amazon (although I do have a very good friend who did that for a couple of years), I just mentioned a couple of things that happened when I lived in such-and-such a place. Rag, Tag & Bobtail, who no doubt lived in Tunbridge-Wells-in-Antipathy his whole life hated the fact that he’d never left, and rather than berating himself for not being bold enough to bring out the daring and gutsy poetry of his own life, he hated me because I was.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Resentment has a way of metastasizing into bitterness, and bitterness has a way of curdling into the kind of anger that can doom a relationship.”
― Dan Savage

“In Ogunquit,” she said, “he was the most insufferable kid you could imagine. A lot of it was compensation for his family situation, I guess… to them it must have seemed like he had hatched from a cowbird egg or something… but after the flu, he seemed to change. At least to me, he did. He seemed to be trying to be, well… a man. Then he changed again. Like all at once. He started to smile all the time. You couldn’t really talk to him anymore. He was… in himself. The way people get when they convert to religion or read—” She stopped suddenly, and her eyes took on a momentary startled look that seemed very like fear.
“Read what?” Stu asked.
“Something that changes their lives,” she said. “Das Kapital. Mein Kampf. Or maybe just intercepted love letters.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“... everybody needed the witches, but hated the fact that they did, and somehow the hatred of the fact could become the hatred of the person.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“and beneath his chivalry to Miss Quested resentment lurked, waiting its day - perhaps there is a grain of resentment in all chivalry.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“Don't mention your fortune in front of an unfortunate.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“The child, a little girl with bare legs and long golden curls, was a being perfectly foreign to him, chiefly because she was trained quite otherwise than he wished her to be. There sprang up between the husband and wife the usual misunderstanding, without even the wish to understand each other, and then a silent warfare, hidden from outsiders and tempered by decorum.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“My truth is but mine alone, as yours is yours. For this reason, I hear and see you free of judgment, fear, anger, and resentment. This is my promise to you. This is my gift to me.”
― Joy Ross, EARTH ANGELS – Edition #1: 13 Journeys of Triumph - Wisdom with Wings

“Hatred hardens and spiritually defeats a resentful person. Animosity aligns a person with what he or she despises and not with what they revere.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“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

“Is an orphaned child in a conquered land supposed to lift his head and face his life, and the whole world, as if nothing is ailing him?
Doomed is he for burying inside that which crumbles mountains.
Damned is he for letting his resentment surface."—Where Will My Heart Beat?”
― Loubna Hassanieh, Where Will My Heart Beat?

“The more you victimize yourself and romanticize your pain, the more you will stay stuck in cycles of misery and resentment.”
― Rabin Paudel

“People will love to despise the person you were, and/or the person you have become. We can allow that negativity to eat us alive, or pray for their happiness. Keep your heart open, and all will be healed.”
― Michelle Cruz-Rosado, Pursuing Your Destiny: How to Overcome Adversity and Achieve Your Dreams

“you probably wanted to feel sorry for yourself more than you wanted what you said you wanted”
― Dmitry Dyatlov

“These were highly intelligent, able-bodied men who were denied access to stable high-paying jobs, which in turn kept them from being able to buy homes, send their kids to college, or save for retirement. It pained them, I know, to be cast aside, to be stuck in jobs that they were overqualified for, to watch white people leapfrog past them at work, sometimes training new employees they knew might one day become their bosses. And it bred within each of them at least a basic level of resentment and mistrust: You never quite knew what other folks saw you to be.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Whether we are happy or sad, grateful or resentful, positive or negative, we are equally precious and deserving.”
― Cathy Burnham Martin, Encouragement: How to Be and Find the Best

“People avoided taking a closer look because they were thrown off by the fact. Getting angry, busting out crying, hating or resenting someone, these are all stages of evasion.”
― Ch'oe Yun, Mannequin

“She allowed anger and resentment to fester inside her and never scab over.”
― Jennifer Mathieu, The Liars of Mariposa Island

“Resentment is a natural human response to people and situations that you don’t wish were there in your Life in the first place. So, don’t try to resist resentment, don’t push it away. Anything that you resist, will persist. Instead, examine the futility of feeling resentful against someone or an event or circumstance. Ask yourself if your resentment is serving any Purpose. By your being resentful against someone or with what has happened, can you undo the past, can you transform the individual that has made you feel this way? If you reflect on how you are feeling you will find that you are the one who is cooking within you. To stop the cooking, to escape that miserable feeling, you must let your resentment go, you must dissolve it. Forgiveness is the only way. Forgive the other person, forgive Life, even forgive yourself for having allowed resentment to fester in you …and see how, magically, instantaneously, you feel liberated and happy!”
― AVIS Viswanathan