These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell.
Alice SeboldRead
Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses the idea of finding true happiness in simple comforts and meaningful connections.
Alice Sebold highlights the importance of both physical comforts and emotional connections that contribute to a sense of happiness and contentment. She contrasts tangible pleasures, like cakes and colors, with the subtler joys found in quiet moments of intimacy and understanding, suggesting that true fulfillment comes from both simple desires and deep human connections.
Themes
HappinessComfortConnectionSimple PleasuresContentment
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about mental health, this quote could be used to emphasize the importance of finding joy in simple moments.
More from Alice Sebold
All quotes →After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.
Alice SeboldRead
The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at an outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: 'booze affects material as it does people'.
Alice SeboldRead
Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.
Alice SeboldRead
As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.
Alice SeboldRead
She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.
Alice SeboldRead
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The joy of Being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or event - through anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you - ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are.
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It is safe to be me. I love life. I am always safe and secure. I move forward in life with joy and ease. All is well in my world.
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I do not understand what the man who is happy wants in order to be happier.
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Physical comforts cannot subdue mental suffering, and if we look closely, we can see that those who have many possessions are not necessarily happy. In fact, being wealthy often brings even more anxiety.
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The happiness of one's own heart alone cannot satisfy the soul; one must try to include, as necessary to one's own happiness, the happiness of others.
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What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?
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