Metaphorical Happiness

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

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.

Still, the longer I was around her, the more I could see the colours of her mind and the recesses of her heart. There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their hearts too. There was strength, and there was also just the determination to look strong. She guarded herself like a secret.

I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations.

Everybody speaks an entirely different language, that’s really what it amounts to.

Lonely, ain’t it?”
“Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.