There are days when none of us can bear it, but the good comes around again. Happiness is seasonal, like anything else. Wait it out. There are people who love you. People who can help.
Interpretation
Happiness can come and go, and it's important to endure difficult times while remembering that support and love exist.
This quote emphasizes the transient nature of happiness and the inevitability of tough days. Sue Grafton reminds us that while we may experience periods of sadness or hardship, joy will eventually return, and we should hold on to the knowledge that there are people in our lives who care for us and can provide support during these challenging times.
In practice
You can use this quote in a motivational speech about overcoming tough times.
Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right - a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.
Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear.
My second husband and I were going through a bitter divorce, and I didn't have the money for a fancy-pants attorney. I didn't know how to fight, so I'd lie awake at night and think of ways to kill him. But I knew I'd get caught, so I decided to put it in a book and get paid for it! I always think it's odd that a whole career came out of that homicidal impulse.
So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.
Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.
A woman should never, never, never be financially dependent to anyone, especially a man, because the minute you were dependent, you could be abused.
For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.
What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.
Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. Thankfulness is the natural impulse to express that feeling. Thanksgiving is the following of that impulse.
We have thousands of opportunities every day to be grateful: for having good weather, to have slept well last night, to be able to get up, to be healthy, to have enough to eat. ... There's opportunity upon opportunity to be grateful; that's what life is.
Always keep your smile. That's how I explain my long life.
Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.
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