Rage—the biggest, truest rage of her adult life—had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn’t like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear. –Stephen King, “Big Driver”

I’ve come within range of hate.
Terrifying, its tremors,
its dizzying obsessions.
Hate’s like a swordfish
invisible in the water,
knifing suddenly into sight
with blood on its blade—
clear water misleads you.
–Pablo Neruda, “Autumn Testament”

Who hasn’t sharpened the edge of his soul?
When, just as our eyes are opened, we see hate,
and just after learning to walk, we are tripped,
and just for wanting to love, we are hated,
and for no more than touching, we are hurt,
which of us hasn’t started to arm himself,
to make himself sharp, somehow,
like a knife, to pay back the hurt?
–Pablo Neruda, “Appointment with Winter, part III”

Raw hatred took its time
making an outpost of its rage
and prepared for me a savage crown
with rusty, bloodstained spikes.
It wasn’t pride that made me keep
my heart at a distance from such terror,
nor did I waste
on revenge
or the pursuit of power
the forces that came from my selfish griefs
or my accumulated joys.
It was something else—my helplessness.
–Pablo Neruda, “To Envy”

I have loved him too much not to feel any hatred for him. –Jean Racine, “Andromaque”

Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand
With a grip that kills it.
–Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us. –Hermann Hesse, Demian

I am angry nearly every day of my life ... but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so. –Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

I couldn’t get angry without something setting off a long colloquy in my head. I’m angry. But maybe I shouldn’t be. Maybe I’m just making too much of nothing. It pissed me off, but if I say so I’ll look silly and supersensitive. I’ll just keep my mouth shut. My sense of outrage would go underground and fester. Later, if I was lucky, I might get a chance to make the offender suffer. “You seem quiet. What’s wrong?” “Nothing.” It was a very Southern-belle skill, this business of hiding hostility behind a smile, a razor hidden in a bouquet of flowers. But wherever I had learned it, I was good at it. –Tracy Thompson, The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression

Poirot: Do not allow Hate into your heart, for it will make a home there.
Jackie: If Love cannot live there, Hate works just as well.
–Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile

Rage keeps the person who feels it company. It moves into the hollows left by grief and loss, and turns inside you like a dark furred animal that grows and fills you; it kills off loneliness and takes its place. –Paula Sharp, I Loved You All

Rage gives you edge, keeps your blood pumping, gives you a reason to get up in the morning. –Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez, The Hell with Love: Poems to Mend a Broken Heart

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns all clean. –Maya Angelou

This hatred overtook me, and I couldn’t help myself. I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn’t go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut. –Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

I wanted to be more mature, more reasonable, I wanted to have a big, fat, forgiving heart that could contain all this rage and still find room for kind, beneficent love, but I didn’t have it in me. I just didn’t. –ditto

I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. –WC Fields, quoted in the Saturday Evening Review, January 28, 1967

Anger is a brief madness. –Horace, Epistles

Nothing brings people together more than mutual hatred. –Henry Rollins

It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something. –Samuel Butler

… and still I stayed to plan all my revenge, my vengeance against those who had turned me from good to evil, and made of me what I was going to be from this day forward. –VC Andrews, Flowers in the Attic

There is no hate such as that born out of love betrayed—and my brain screamed out for revenge. –ditto

Hating people is like burning down your house to kill a rat. –Henry Fosdick

When you are angry or frustrated, what comes out? Whatever it is, it’s a good indication of what you’re made of. –H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

What do you despise? By this you are truly known. –Frank Herbert, Dune

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less. –Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice

I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate. –Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

Hate is the coward’s revenge for being humiliated. –George Bernard Shaw, “Major Barbara”

Hatred can become like food, it gives you this energy that you can, like, live off ... –Claire Danes, in My So-Called Life

It is human to hate those whom we have injured. –Tacitus, Life of Agricola

I suppose things are better now, but ... I don’t know. People still hate each other, they just know how to hide it better. –Steve Buscemi, in Ghost World

The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves. –Charles Caleb Colton

Forgive me. I don’t mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry. –Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent

No more tears now; I will think about revenge. –Mary, Queen of Scots

[it’s about] being bitter but patient with your own bitterness so you could learn to be wise and be kind of returned to whatever innocence you might have once had before you became bitter … –Crescent Dragonwagon, The Year it Rained

There is only one way to get revenge on the world: living well. –anonymous

It’s far easier to forgive an enemy after you’ve gotten even with him. –Olan Miller

Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
–Sylvia Plath, “Lesbos”

He’s not human; he’s an empty space disguised as a human. –John Fowles, The Collector

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike? –Jean Cocteau

Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others. –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

The only thing better than succeeding is watching people you know fail. –Nikki Cox, in Unhappily Ever After

I love him so much it just turns to hate. –Hole, “Doll Parts”

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead
–Bob Dylan, “Masters of War”

Ninety percent of everything is crap. –Theodore Sturgeon

After all, there’s no point in hurting somebody who doesn’t mean anything to you. –from Bitter Moon

You could throw her in the river and skim ugly for three days. –anonymous

That slut! When she dies they’ll have to bury her in a Y-shaped coffin! –Bette Davis, on Barbara Stanwyck

He’s the only man I ever knew who had rubber pockets so he could steal soup. –Wilson Mizner

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy. –Woody Allen

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe. –Frank Zappa

Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel, and incompetent comes naturally to me. –John Cleese

I’d call her a cunt, but she lacks the depth and the charm. –William Styron

He doesn’t move his face when he talks. His eyes are like shark eyes. Dead. –Carrie Fisher’s opinion of Sam Donaldson

I’m the wife Spike Lee deserves. A white woman, which he says he would never be with, so let’s get someone really white. I am Spike Lee’s wife from Hell. I’m white and weird and I won’t pay enough attention to him. If he does any more of those angry interviews, I’m going to write him and see if he wants the wife he deserves. –Carrie Fisher

“Family” this and “family” that. If I had a family I’d be furious that moral busybodies are taking the perfectly good word family and using it as a code for censorship the same way “states’ rights” was used to disguise racism in the mid-sixties. –John Waters

Did you ever consider that LSD was really one of the most dangerous drugs ever manufactured because the people who took it turned into yuppies? –Frank Zappa

The yuppie lived in a special type of aquarium created for him by the Reagan administration. It was an era when there was enough cash and enough movement up and down in the stock market and enough shady deals that these incompetent shitheads were able to make vast amounts of money to buy their Ferraris and snort their cocaine and ruin the economy. Now there’s nostalgia for the ability to do that. People wish that the good old days of the eighties would come back. When there was still something to steal. –ditto

His speeches leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a struggling thought and bear it triumphantly a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork. –William McAdoo, on William G. Harding, quoted in Leon A. Harris’s The Fine Art of Political Wit

I simply like guns because you can’t shoot people without them. –Florence King

Somebody hand me a gun. –muttered by some guy behind me in line at Wal-Mart, when the kids he was babysitting continually annoyed him

I think bad taste should be a felony. –Margo Kaufman

Most vegetarians I ever see looked enough like their food they to be classed as cannibals. –Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley’s Philosophy

What dark corner of the soul did you crawl out of? –Jerry O’Connell, in Sliders

Big mouths and small brains don’t mix! –Ehren Metcalf

Bacteria: the only culture some people have. –seen on the internet

When I think of the energy I wasted hating you … –Gillian Taylforth to Pam St. Clement, in EastEnders

Some people are alive simply because it’s against the law to kill them. –anonymous

Vengeance is mine, said the good lord Jehovah
but he’ll have to wait his turn
’cos I am gonna do Pete over
gonna trample on his willy
pull his hairs out one by one
gonna tape record his screams
and play them when I want some fun
gonna stick pins in his nipples
and twist them till he howls
I’m gonna shove a funnel up his bum
and pour cola in his bowels.
–Lennie St. Luce, “Pete the Pole”