Happiness

Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. Wearing slippers and watching the Miss Universe contest. Eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Getting to level seven in Dragon Master and knowing there were twenty more levels to go.

Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day.

maybe it didn't matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn't matter if your friend was possibly dying.


Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.


--page 282 (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Ann Brashares)

from The Secret of Life

i am not the happiest person. in fact, in the battle between joy and misery, i'd say that the latter often seems to prevail. i don't like this, and everyday i refuse, for the eighty millionth time, to put up with another minute of it. but the world does what it does, and i often find it disagreeable. after all these years, i'm kind of resigned to that.

but i do have one thing on my side: i have enormous faith. and hope. i am not speaking of the kind you find in church or in the afterlife or in heaven or in the King James Bible or in the Hare Krishnas that we all encounter changing flights in the airports of the world. i am speaking of a simple faith that says that one way or another, no matter how many times i stumble and stub my big toes, somehow life is going to work itself out.

the secret of life, elizabeth wurtzel

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)

Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. Wearing slippers and watching the Miss Universe contest. Eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Getting to level seven in Dragon Master and knowing there were twenty more levels to go.

Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day.

maybe it didn't matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn't matter if your friend was possibly dying.

Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.

--page 282

The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. ~Chapter (1 or 2)?


There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. ~Chapter 2


I hate handing over money for what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous. ~Chapter 5


I felt like a race horse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like a date on a tombstone. ~Chapter 7?


...I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. ~Chapter 7


So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state. ~Chapter 7


If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days. ~Chapter 8


I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full. ~Chapter 9


I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead. ~Chapter 12


I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. ~Chapter 12? or 13?


[W]herever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. ~Chapter 15


To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. ~Chapter 20


How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again? ~Chapter 20


I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am. ~Chapter 20


There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road. ~Chapter 20

from "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" (Mitch Albom)

i've just finished reading Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven and wow! it's an amazing book. take it from someone who read the book in just one day. it's very moving and it kind of changes your perspective on heaven. i like the idea of your life being explained to you when you get there. all the questions... all the lose ends would finally be dealt with. there are five people waiting for us in heaven to explain all the question marks to us.

i love the way Mitch Albom wrote the book. definitely worth every penny.

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"There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man suddenly said. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You many not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth."

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"People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.
This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. to have it explained. it is the peace you have been searching for."

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"...there are no random acts. that we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

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"...fairness," he said, "does not govern life and death. if it did, no good person would ever die."

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"Strangers," the Blue Man said, "are just family you have yet to come to know."

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"Dying? not the end of everything. we think it is. but what happens on earth is only the beginning.

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"sacrifice is a part of life. it is supposed to be. it's not something to regret. it's something to aspire to. little sacrifices. big sacrifices. a mother works so her son can go to school. a daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.

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"sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. you're just passing it on to someone else."

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holding anger is poison. it eats you from the inside. we think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. but hatred is a curved blade. and the harm we do, we do to ourselves.

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love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. but sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.

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"lost love is still love, eddie. it takes a different form, that's all. you can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. but hwen those senses weaken, another heightens. memory. memory becomes your partner. you nurture it. you hold it. you dance with it."

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"life has to end," she said. "love doesnt."