Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intention, is human, normal, and we should forgive ourselves. But the raised hand, the actual violent enactment, is cursed. The maths says so. There’ll be no reversion to the status quo ante, no balm, no sweet relief, or none that lasts. Only a second crime. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches a civilisation. It’s a reversion to constant, visceral fear. Ian Mcewan
If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you're allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.
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Shannon L. Alder
Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.
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Euripides
We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged
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Heinrich Heine
It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.
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Seamus Heaney
Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
More Quotes By Ian Mcewan
When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself...
Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had...
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.
