Too Much Happiness: Stories

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood – that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

She sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herb tea which is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practices through the procession of hours, or of days.

Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.

I began to understand that there were certain talkers--certain girls--whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people--people like me--who didn't concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.

It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.

Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, were something happened, and then there are all the other places

She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word 'escape' used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

And at the end of his letter one terrible sentence. 'If I loved you I would have written differently.

One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them.

Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.

there were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away.

It seems so ridiculous to me,' he said, 'that a person should be expected to lock themselves into a suit of clothes. I mean like the suit of clothes of an engineer or a doctor or a geologist and then the skin grows over it, over the clothes, I mean, and that person can't ever get them off. When we are given a chance to explore the whole world of inner and outer reality and to live in a way that takes in the spiritual and the physical and the whole range of the beautiful and the terrible available to mankind, that is pain as well as joy and turmoil. This way of expressing myself may seem overblown to you, but one thing I have learned to give up is intellectual pridefulness...

None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade.

The college library was a high beautiful space, designed and built and paid for by people who believed that those who sat at the long tables before open books—even those who were hung-over, sleepy, resentful, and uncomprehending—should have space above them, panels of dark gleaming wood around them, high windows bordered with Latin admonitions, through which to look at the sky. For a few years before they went into schoolteaching or business or began to rear children, they should have that. And now it was my turn and I should have it too.

He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him.

She hated to hear the word "escape" used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

The dark and the snow are too thick for him to see beyond the first trees. He’s been in there before at this time, when the dark shuts down in early winter. But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It’s not a matter of one tree after another, it’s all the trees together, aiding and abetting one another and weaving into one thing. A transformation, behind your back. There’s another name for the bush, and this name is stalking around in his mind, in and out of where he can almost grasp it. But not quite. It’s a tall word that seems ominous but indifferent.

He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.

He says the pills he's got her on will keep her from sinking too low. How low is too low, Roy thinks, and when can you tell?

For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don't vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there's a switchback, what's been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done.

They would be displeased to have anybody call them docile, yet in a way they are. They submit themselves to manly behaviour. They submit themselves to manly behaviour with all its risks and cruelties, its complicated burdens and deliberate frauds. Its rules, which in some cases you benefited from, as a woman, and then some that you didn't.

It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation

I slipped the envelope into it, there in the wide lower corridor of the Arts Building with people passing me on the way to classes, on the way to have a smoke and maybe a game of bridge in the Common Room. On their way to deeds they didn't know they had in them.

Detestaba la palabra «evasión» aplicada a la ficción. Podría haber argumentado, y no solo por llevar la contraria, que la evasión era la vida real.

It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love... the Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian.