“Spurned pity can turn into cruelty just as spurned love turns into hate.”

— Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Verschmähtes Erbarmen kann sich in Grausamkeit verwandeln, wie verschmähte Liebe in Haß.
Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 33.

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Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach81

Austrian writer 1830–1916

George Peele (1556–1596) English translator and poet

Polyhymnia (1590), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“And the love we hold, and the love we spurn,
Will never grow cold, only taciturn”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Sadie
The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)

“Accounts are not quite settled between us," said she, with a passion that equaled my own. "I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

“But that was just it - hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.”

Terry Pratchett book Maskerade

Source: Maskerade

“At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father’s business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 89

“I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me?”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

The monster to Robert Walton
Frankenstein (1818)
Context: You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured wasting in impotent passions. For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me?