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I never meet anyone nowadays who admits to having had a happy childhood. Everyone appears to think happiness betokens a lack of sensitivity.

— Jessamyn West

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Happiness

More quotes by Jessamyn West

We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise — when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter.

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

To See the Dream (1956)

In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?

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The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

Thomas Babington Macaulay History of England (1849)

The key to self-generated happiness (the only reliable kind) is the refusal to take oneself too seriously.

Tom Robbins High Times interview (2002)

It is the law of life that if you are kind to someone you feel happy. If you are cruel you are unhappy. And if you hurt someone, you will be hurt back.

Cary Grant Love – That’s All Cary Grant Ever Thinks About (1964)

Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy.

Spider Robinson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jessamyn West (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.