A bruised apple is not all bad. It still has tremendous potential.

She remembered how Billy always picked the first apple blossoms and put them into a tin cup for her. They made the house smell like springtime. Billy said apple trees were a double blessing, first for the blossoms and then the apples.

The apples that grew on the fruit-tree of knowledge By woman were pluck'd, and she still wears the prize To tempt us in theatre, senate, or college-- I mean the love-apples that bloom in the eyes. - Horace Smith and James Smith,

And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer--apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude.

there are always a few bad apples.

There's plenty of boys that will come hankering and gruvvelling around when you've got an apple, and beg the core off you; but when they're got one, and you beg for the core, and remind them how you give them a core one time, they take a mouth at you, and say thank you 'most to death, but there ain't a-going to be no core.