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Time & Perspective Quote by Barbara de Angelis

"The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present"

About this Quote

De Angelis smuggles a therapeutic injunction into a romantic premise: your love life is being held hostage by your private archive. The line works because it frames anger not as righteous fuel but as psychic luggage. "Carry in your heart" turns resentment into something bodily and ongoing, a weight you keep choosing to haul around. Then she pivots to a scarcity model of emotion: there is only so much room inside you, and anger crowds out tenderness. It's less a moral scolding than a quiet accounting.

The subtext is classic self-help realism: the past is not over because your nervous system hasn't agreed to let it be over. Anger becomes a form of time travel - a rehearsed argument you keep re-winning, a story that protects you from being surprised again. That protection has a cost. If you expect harm, you interpret ambiguity as threat, and intimacy starts to feel like a negotiation rather than a risk worth taking. "Less capable" is doing careful work here; she doesn't claim you can't love, only that your range shrinks. Love becomes conditional, defensive, transactional.

Context matters: Barbara De Angelis built a career in the late-80s/90s relationship-industrial complex, when talk shows and paperback advice were translating therapy language into everyday scripts. This sentence is engineered to be repeatable, a pocket-sized reframe for people stuck in grievance. Its intent isn't historical amnesia; it's leverage. Forgiveness, here, isn't about letting someone off the hook. It's about taking your own future off theirs.

Quote Details

TopicLetting Go
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Angelis, Barbara de. (2026, January 14). The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-more-anger-towards-the-past-you-carry-in-your-171062/

Chicago Style
Angelis, Barbara de. "The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present." FixQuotes. January 14, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-more-anger-towards-the-past-you-carry-in-your-171062/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present." FixQuotes, 14 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-more-anger-towards-the-past-you-carry-in-your-171062/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Barbara de Angelis is a Writer from USA.

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