Happiness Falls Quotes
"The world turned blank. A bright orange. A kaleidoscope of phosphenes swirled, replaced by bursts of red that exploded like translucent fireworks, turning the palette darker and more intense, into a deep crimson. I squeezed my eyes tighter, and black pinpoints oozed into blobs like inkblots on wet paper, bouncing up and down in the same rhythm as Eugene’s head in the window."
"Eugene was a 'true one-in-a-million marvel.'"
"You don’t have to say it; I know—wishing, pretending, doesn’t make it so."
"Your mornings are the same the way snowflakes are the same."
"Focusing on differences... can make the most difference."
"But he didn’t; he placed his crystal water goblet into a pinpoint beam of sunlight coming through the window, creating tiny rainbows on the table, and said, 'Look, Eugene, your favorite.'"
"There’s this moment right when you wake up after something horrible has happened, and everything seems normal."
"Don’t I care? I’m not the one who didn’t notice he didn’t come back."
"They say déjà vu is a memory-sequencing miscue, an eerie byproduct of your brain trying to reconcile the accidental activation of the wrong memory bank."
"My assumption that Eugene couldn’t understand pretty much anything had been ingrained for more than a decade."
"There had to be a rational explanation for the appearance of the phrase happiness quotient in my head."
"Normalcy = desirable. Is this assumption true?"
"We don’t know him, but we’re telling you, he would never do that."
"I would take a pathetic, two-faced, deplorable Alive Dad I could hit and scream at over a noble, funny, lovable Dead Dad a thousand times."
"The minute I thought that, I realized: my going on about hoping, wishing, praying it wouldn’t be Dad and how I’d rather he be dead than a man who’d cheat on his wife and abandon his vulnerable kid—that was all bullshit."
"Seeing Mom stand up to Detective Janus, though, forcing this tall, scowling cop into an awkward, fake-conciliatory smile-nod with a curt 'Point taken'—I could totally see the kick-ass professional Mom was, is, could see why Dad fell for her."
"That Summer is code for the time our parents almost got a divorce."
"I remember that whole winter/spring of PSW as the happiest time for our family."
"She became a person I’d never known, her smile wide and crinkled, both rows of teeth showing, even the molars, the way it was in pictures of her and Dad, pre-us."
"There are moments when something we’ve idealized all our lives changes and becomes something less."
"When an emergency happens, you expect the whole world to shut down, or at least you wish it would."
"You don’t become obsessed with happiness, trying to maximize it and experimenting to calibrate it unless it’s a mystery."
"Why use numbers to represent states of emotion? I believe that trying to create a quantification method for happiness is futile and meaningless."
"Because lottery winner’s baseline (denominator) is now higher, small moments of joy affect them less. Conversely, those small things make accident victims happier."
"I need experiments. Figuring out: Is it possible to manipulate happiness levels, to change your (or your family’s) mindset to maximize happiness and minimize sadness?"
"The counterintuitive examples show that changing your baseline—your conception of yourself and your normal life—impacts happiness levels tremendously."
"I stood up. I wanted to run out of this room, to hell with Dad and his ridiculous theories and cruel experiments, and never see these pages again."
"Manslaughter. Such an ugly word, the implications not only of death and blame but of butchery, of carnage."
"It was both astonishing and appalling, seeing Eugene so comfortable, behaving with so much competence and confidence."
"What was wrong with me? I’d actually expected to see Dad in some form—sitting behind the desk, grinning madly like a cartoon villain while manipulating pretend-death-experiment spreadsheets."
"When you can’t talk, people assume you can’t understand and talk about you in front of you. It’s humiliating."
"I find it really fascinating how deeply ingrained it is in our society—not just the US, but human society in general—how we equate verbal ability with intelligence and worth."
"It was amazing how much better I felt, knowing Mom went through the same painful experience."
"We should have been elated, or at least hopeful. And there was an undercurrent of that, of course. The wonder of this unbelievable discovery."
"I want the same for you: this basic emotional, mental equivalent, the presumption of intelligence, competence, to prevent an internal imprisonment—of your mind, your soul."
"Because using this unfamiliar word helps us to think about talking differently than we’re used to, as a multistep system with separate parts."
"You’ve been learning and absorbing all along from the sidelines, from TV, family dinner conversations, books read to you, your siblings doing homework, all that."
"But it’s enough to tell me what I already suspected... You know a lot more than anyone’s given you credit for."
"I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations, about what someone hearing this story for the first time might expect us to do or say at any given moment."
"So if it was this painful for Mom and me, what was it like for those who have beautifully formed thoughts they can’t express their entire lives?"
"This reminded me of when Eugene first received the 'cognitive deficit' label and I asked Dad—but what about Stephen Hawking?"
"It’s as silly and ridiculous an image as I can think of. Maybe that’s why I treasure it and hold it close to my heart. Because it was our one period of respite."
"I could very well imagine—if the only two people in the world who knew about the thoughts trapped in your mind ran away without telling anyone, wouldn’t that be as tragic, as intolerable, as your father’s death?"
"Words matter. They influence our thinking."
"Memories are short, I guess is what I’m trying to say, and even now, only three months since that day, it already seems strange to me how we were outside with masks on, all relatively healthy..."
"I didn’t know back then that there are some things you can’t say out loud."
"Such an elemental thing we take for granted, like air, that once it’s gone, you’d give anything to have it back."
"Does that sound absurd? But here’s the thing—being furious at your dad feels so much better than grieving for him, being scared to death you’ll never see him again."
"Dad was one of those naturally hyper-skeptical people. You know the type, who equate cynicism with depth and intellect, who go around saying 'anecdotal proof' is oxymoronic, who demand objective evidence..."
"A no to the NO. Just because I couldn’t quite say YES doesn’t mean NO, doesn’t mean I don’t want to or can’t communicate. Believe me. I am in here. I have things to say."
"The energy that zapped through us at that moment—was I delusional? Were we all? Because why did it feel like success?"
"A true missing-person story is the purest mystery because the only person who knows what happened is the missing person."
"This was why it had taken us hours yesterday to even work up the nerve to try to communicate with Eugene. Our first chance to break through that lifelong wall of mystery was intimidating enough."
"UBT. BUT U MADE HIM SEE. MY FAM NOT KNOWING = WAITING = SUFFERING 4 ME."
"D ALWAYS SAYS SORRY. MY SONS DISABLED DOESNT KNOW WHAT HES DOING DOESNT UNDERSTAND. BUT THIS TIME D SAID DIDNT U SEE WHAT HAPPENED? DONT U THINK HE HAS RIGHT 2 B MAD KICK & SCREAM? I DO & IF U CANT HANDLE IT U SHOULD LEAVE."
"BEST TALK I EVER HAD W ANYBODY EVER."
"It felt like the end. It should have been the end. We had our answer. We knew what happened to Dad. The only thing we wanted to do was grieve and begin to learn to live with this new reality—children without a father, a wife without a husband."
"Mia and the Dalai Lama: How to Be Ambitious and Happy: Jan 2018. Mia got this fortune cookie last night: 'The Dalai Lama says to be truly happy in life, you should learn to stop wanting what you don’t have.'"
"Is happiness truly incompatible with ambition? The happiness industry does seem to assume an inverse correlation between happiness and ambition; there are countless articles about how you can become happier by moderating your ambition."
"In music, the longer a dissonant chord is sustained, the greater the emotional satisfaction when it resolves."
"I think maybe you’re feeling guilty because it feels unseemly to be celebrating at a time like this. But it’s a triumph. Not just the hearing, but Eugene finally getting to communicate his ideas and advocate for himself."
"If you set the epistemological bar high enough, there are things that can never be proven; extreme skepticism leads to nihilism, the erasure of all meaning."
"Do you see? They are here. They're f***ing here, same as you. They have words, thoughts, opinions."
"For some of us, the premise that happiness is the end-all and be-all of life is flat-out wrong."
"It’s messier than I expected. The wind scatters it all over. But one clump of black ashes hits the water, spreads like a puddle of ink, and slowly sinks."
"In a few minutes, it’ll dip below the horizon, no longer visible at all, just as the sun peeks up on the opposite horizon. When Eugene’s sitting here later, when I hand him the pencil-stylus, I’ll tell him about the full moon, how it’s still there in our orbit even though we can’t see it, still luminous in the sun’s light, waiting for sunset to rise again."