Quotes About Envy

Good Lord, I hated her, but you had to admire the bitch.

Amy was absolutely beautiful. I hated her. I was afraid of her.

Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies.

That's the whole point of being rich," I explain patiently. "What good is it if nobody's jealous?

We need Nellie and dry clothes. Dan glared resentfully at the retreating yaht in the distance. A grenade launcher would be nice, too.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

For a man to successful, not only must he succeed but his friends must also fail.

When a friend succeeds a little something inside me dies.

Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?

And yet he was happier in his unused room simply because it was his, his possession. I thought with bitterness and envy, if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.

Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful and in his trade my father was a success. If a client didn't like my father's manner or his estimates, he could go elsewhere. My father wouldn't have cared. Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.

D. felt a little envious of him as he stood there in the yard among the cars — he looked established. Five hundred years of inbreeding had produced him, set him against an exact background, made him at home, and at the same a time haunted — by the vices of ancestors and the tastes of the past.

Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.

When you are miserable, you envy other people's happiness.' It wasn't what I had ever expected him to learn in the Ministry of Home Security. And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.

When you are miserable you envy other people's happiness.

The dead were to be envied. It was the living who had to suffer from loneliness and distrust.

I thought with bitterness and envy: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.

Her people would kill one beauty to make another.

It's hard to be genuinely enthusiastic if you can never have what's in front of you—when it comes so easily to others.

Sour grapes, the champagne of the intelligentsia.

I sat near enough to hear the happiness, but far enough away not to feel it.

Khaderbhai once said that if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we're half way to wisdom. I hope he wasn't right about that. I hope good envy takes you further than that, because a lifetime has passed since that day at the wire, and I still envy Anand's calm communion with fate, and I long for it with all my flawed and striving heart.

His face was unmarked, his skin showing no scar or scratch or faded bruise. It occurred to me, as I listened to his genial chatter, that it was likely he'd never been in a fight, or even closed his fist in anger. I envied him. When I allowed myself to look into the half-collapsed tunnel of the past, it seemed that I'd been fighting all my life.