Family Happiness

After all, family life was the mortar that kept the bricks together; the pitch that made the basket watertight; the chinking that kept out the wind and the weather. It was life itself, without an inch to spare. A person immersed in the realities of family life did not stop to ponder the meaning of life: that person was in life, up to his or her neck and beyond. The family was the beginning, the future, and the past. It protected the weak and the strong. It brought the like-minded together and gave the unalike a common cause. It gave shelter and hope. What more, Polly wondered, could a sensible person possibly want?

Anxiety, she thought, was like a flock of birds on a telephone line. When people came around they flapped off, and when the people went away they hopped back on.

I love the process of learning a thing. It’s doing a thing I find so boring.

I'd rather be myself, and have gone through all this misery, than to be whatever it was I thought I was supposed to be.

Unhappiness isn’t the worst thing in the world. It doesn’t last forever and it usually teaches you something about yourself.

life is deflective: it gives everybody something to do. It absorbs sadness and sops up loneliness. It provides work, company, and entertainment. It makes tasks for idle hands and allows an anxious spirit to hide in its capacious bosom.

Polly había llorado tanto que se sentía deshidratada. El llanto juvenil es una cosa y el llanto adulto otra muy distinta. Las lágrimas de la juventud son limpiadoras, como las siestas o las duchas tonificantes. Una buena llorera hace que el joven que sufre sienta que se ha conseguido algo. Las lágrimas de la edad adulta dejan a la víctima seca y agotada. Dejan los ojos escocidos. Dejan a su paso un dolor bajo las costillas y en la frente.