Happiness Quotes

“I hope what she hears are directions for happiness; the happiness blueprint. But I don’t think there is one. We find happiness, if we find it at all, on accident. We trip over it on our own way somewhere else. It’s woven out of the oddest circumstances.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“We act out of a Molotov cocktail of conscuious and unconscious desires. And also, we just do stuff.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“everything. If you are lucky, you meet four or five people in a lifetime who you’re totally comfortable with. Comfortable in a way that causes your best self to surge forward. With them, rowing through life’s quotidian mess is an adventure. I thought of my mom and me, twenty years earlier, cracking up as the Corolla filled with water.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“When, anyway, did happiness become the one golden ring we reach for? How about being guided by what is right or ethical or meaningful? Or by making—as Brian sometimes called it—the “growth choice.” That sounded good, but I wasn’t that mature. I’d always aimed for what brought me the most joy.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“Serious illness, life-threatening illness, was outside the realm of my imagination. If pushed to consider the question, I might have responded that I was protected from the possibility by the mere fact that it had never occurred to me. I might have said, “If I can’t imagine it, how can it happen?”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.” We ate our soggy hot dogs, in our soggy clothes, then”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“There was a collective hope at the service that the children were in heaven. Riding ponies, playing bingo, exploring the sea. But I don’t think heaven is so much like earth. If heaven exists, I hope it is far beyond what we conjure with our gravity-soaked imaginations. To my mind, it is OK if there is no heaven. It is miraculous enough that Sam and Ramone lived. They were here, on earth, as themselves. The spontaneous eruption of an individual consciousness out of nothingness. I know this is too easy for me to say—I have one child healing, and the other murmuring self-soothing songs on the back of a blue bike. It is too easy. But still, it’s what I hold against my chest. They died, but, before that, they lived.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“Happiness—slippery, mobile, sneaky, and spry—enters the most unlikely rooms, unbidden. It can sneak up on you nearly anywhere and likewise wisp away.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“Both teller and listener have one duty: to believe. No matter how bad. Believe. Believe and remember; remember and believe. Because remembering and believing were all we had to give.”
― Heather Harpham , Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“We find happiness, if we find it at all, on accident. We trip over it on our way somewhere else. It's woven out of the oddest circumstances. Sometimes we're engulfed by our senses...other times it is a quiet happiness, a counterintuitive happiness”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“I thought of the Auden quote, "Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh." We ate our soggy hot dogs, in our soggy clothes, then drove home. A nothing afternoon that meant everything. If you are lucky, you meet four or five people in a lifetime who you're totally comfortable with. Comfortable in a way that causes your best self to surge forward. With them, rowing through life's quotidian mess is an adventure.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“She skipped along in front of us, past the lobby fountain with its glimmering layer of coins, each one an underwater wish.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“If you are lucky, you meet four or five people in a lifetime who you’re totally comfortable with. Comfortable in a way that causes your best self to surge forward.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“And, finally, the obvious dawned on me: I was not my mother. Brian was not my father. Together, we were not anyone from the past. And, as potentially unsound as our little family of four was, we were in fact a family of four. Our unit was primary. Trying to make a family is a gamble, and if I was going to bet on something, I would bet on what I wanted, what I hoped form, what I believed in. And that was a life with Brian.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“Yes to another child who might be sick, yes to having two children under two years old at the same time, yes to Brian. Yes, yes, yes to drool, late nights, mutual accusation, yes to euphoria, yes to the probable, the impossible, the impractical, yes to boy, yes to girl, yes, if need be, to a cabbage patch kid. Yes to the whole crazy, doomed mess. Yes, to whoever had chosen us, yes, we chose you back, yes. Yes to life, yes to the flower of the mountain, yes to yes. I say yes. Come on and come little soul. We accept you.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“The joy choice was yes. Or at least that was the choice with the highest probability of joy. True, a pile of potential anguish lay on the opposite side of the scale. But this is the deal in life: the inevitable twofer of joy and misery in their boxer's clinch.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“If you are lucky, you meet four or five people in a lifetime who you’re totally comfortable with. Comfortable in a way that causes your best self to surge forward. With them, rowing through life’s quotidian mess is an adventure.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“Bed, where the trick was to stay awake long enough to enjoy it.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“I dipped my nose to the baby’s head; she still smelled like herself. At least I was getting back the same girl I’d given them.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“For her, I was the girl, and this whole ambulance was the plastic box.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“Daylight. I relaxed a little. Surely nothing catastrophic could happen during business hours.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“There was no one. And then, poof—her.”
― Heather Harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

“We were in the throes of infatuation, soft-minded and easily persuaded of our rightness for each other by sexual thrill.”
― heather harpham, Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After