The Novel Habits of Happiness

She knew that she had a tendency to allow her mind to wander, but surely that's what made the world interesting. One thought led to another, one memory triggered another. How dull it would be, she thought, not to be reminded of the interconnectedness of everything, how dull for the present not to evoke the past, for here not to imply there.

That was what counted, she told herself: those unexpected moments of appreciation, unanticipated glimpses of beauty or kindness - any of the things that attached us to this world, that made us forget, even for a moment, its pain and its transience.

It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry,” he said.

He said: What is patriotism but love of the food one ate as a child?

Perhaps this was a concomitant of freedom: if people were free, then some of them, at least, would be free of the constraints of good taste. Perhaps

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow…There must be reasons why the leaves decay. (From Auden's "If I Could Tell You

Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down—or up, I suppose—replacing other people in the process.

All of us had hard choices, she thought; the greatest of us and the least of us, and we had to feel our way through them and accept that there would sometimes be regrets.

There are so many things we take in subconsciously and are unaware we ever saw. There is plenty of lumber like that in our minds.

Look at every territorial dispute you care to mention. Northern Ireland, for instance.” “Religion in that case,” Jamie ventured. “Not just. Religion was the badge of identity, but it wasn’t really about whether you went to Mass or to a tub-thumping Protestant chapel. It was a result of the movement of people. The Protestant planters—many of them Scots—replaced the native Irish, remember? Movement of people again.

Which is what we all do, she thought, as sleep came to her; we live out our years as best we can, not knowing their number, not really knowing, in the case of most of us, why we do what we do and how we came to be where we are; thinking we know it, but suspecting that we do not really know.

Isabel was a philosopher, and philosophers were distrustful of broad propositions.

Now she glanced at the piles of books and papers on her desk. There are no chains, she thought, except those we create for ourselves. That, of course, was not entirely true: there were plenty of chains, real or imaginary, that people created for others--or that desks created, she thought...

Cyberspace is a big country. You can do just about anything anywhere.

Unlearned language?” “There’s a technical term for it,” she said. “Xenoglossy. It’s the ability to speak a language you’ve never learned. Some people appear to do so under hypnosis; they’re put into a trance and they start talking as another personality. It’s regression.

There’s no excuse,” said Isabel firmly. “Biscuits are trivial, but lies are not.

we live out our years as best we can, not knowing their number, not really knowing, in the case of most of us, why we do what we do and how we came to be where we are; thinking we know it, but suspecting that we do not really know.

Isabel looked at her. “Five pieces? Isn’t that the Government recommendation?” “It’s none of their business,” said Jamie. Isabel disagreed. “Oh, I think it is. If the Government has to pick up the bill when we get ill, then surely it has the right to tell us how to avoid getting ill in the first place.

Without imagination we find it more difficult to be good, because imagination enables us to understand the pain of others: destroy imagination and you destroyed empathy.

he had said that he had used a camera obscura device to paint his pictures. It had seemed such an unlikely theory, and yet Hockney’s explanation made it seem so feasible. It was all to do with angles and perspective, and when you came to look at a Vermeer, there was a definite photographic feel to the artist’s work.

A noisy noise annoys an oyster. Or so the tongue twister would have us believe.

Violins sang, brass crowed, while bassoons, she felt, rumbled according to a Richter scale all of their own. Charlie

that was enough to make her blush with shame for the mere fact that Las Vegas existed. There

He’s called Ottolenghi, that chef. And he deserves a tongue twister of his own. Lo, Ottolenghi lengthens leeks laterally. How about that? Or, Competent chefs count cous cous cautiously?

…one of the coasts of a country that was a lifeboat, and that lifeboat was under siege by people who wanted to be taken on board. She thought to the southern shores of Italy and the boats that came up from the south, crammed with the desperate of North Africa striving to get into Europe. The vessels capsized under their human cargo; there were people in the water, their dream coming to a watery end. How could one turn one’s face against all of that? What sort of person would one have to be to sail past?

…one of those dreadful boarding schools. It was down on the South Coast. I think some very unpleasant things happened there…. So many lives were distorted by such cruelty. I know so many men who had to put up with that, so many….

…did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause.

Let’s not have a sniffle, let’s have a jolly good cry And always remember, the longer you live, the sooner you jolly well die.

clichéd in their repetition and their superficiality, but part of an identity that saved us from feeling utterly lonely and detached, mere passengers on a circular rock spinning through space.