Happiness

I wonder what inspires a man to complain of “having nothing to do.” I am happiest when I have nothing to distract me and I am completely alone.

'What is so wrong with America,' he repeated, as if it was the title of a lecture. As indeed it was.

‘To tell the truth, I never had it so good,’ he wrote. ‘But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.’ That was hardly a joke. When a man’s breast feels like a cage from which all the dark birds have flown – he is free, he is light.

This life is a hospital in which each patient is possessed by a desire to change beds. One would prefer to suffer by the stove. Another believes he would recover if he sat by the window.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability.

Always, Mrs Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight.