Quotes About Joy

Love is a constant negotiation, a constant conversation; to love someone is to lay yourself open to rejection and abandonment; love is something you can earn but not extort. It is an arena in which you are not in control, because someone else also has rights and decisions; it is a collaborative process; making love is at its best a process in which those negotiations become joy and play.

Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

mutual aid and pleasure are linked, that the ties that bind are grounds for celebration as well as obligation.

My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere. I imagined when I was young some science-fiction version of humans becoming brains in jars as a good thing, that our bodies were some sad thing we were mired in rather than instruments of joy, connection, and vitality, the non-negotiable terms of our existence.

Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe.

Those who doubt that these moments matter should note how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract. And it often has. Sometimes your enemies know what your friends can't believe. Those who dismiss these moments because of their imperfections, limitations, or incompleteness need to look harder at what joy and hope shine out of them

when exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?

There was a joy, she said, to finding that her body was adequate to get her where she was going, and it was a gift to develop a more tangible, concrete relationship to her neighbourhood and its residents.

Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.

if enjoyment is the right word for that sense of immersion in the moment and solidarity with others caused by the rupture in everyday life, an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive. We don't even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.

And yet the experience happens anyway. Again and again I have seen people slip into this realm and light up with joy. The lack of language doesn't prevent them from experiencing it, only from grasping and making something of it.

They wanted to rock, they wanted to roll, they wanted to feel the peculiarly human feeling of having a perfect night in an imperfect world.

What Sidda did not know was how much more singing there was when Vivi was growing up. That's the kind of thing the history books don't tell you. How people sang outdoors all the time.

The Germans are about to reach Stalingrad, and the gas chambers are heating up, but the Ya-Yas are still in high school, and the life of the porch still surrounds them. They are lazy together. This is comfort. This is joy. Just look at these four. Not one wears a watch. This porch time is not planned. Not penciled into a DayRunner . . .I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

Très Ya-Ya-No!

The happiness in her eyes made my heart hurt.

It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life.

To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also.

We have no experience prioritizing our own joy or making an investment in ourselves. But it is very easy to say yes to responsibility and obligation. We are highly motivated when we can be of service to someone else.

Wir müssen uns Milarepa als glücklichen Menschen vorstellen, so wie Albert Camus uns Sisyphos beschreibt. Auch mein Weg, mein Optimismus, mein Humor, meine Lebensfreude sind zuallererst der Fähigkeit geschuldet, Sinn zu stiften. Sind doch Sinn und das Absurde untrennbar miteinander verwoben. Wie Leben und Tod auch.

Ein glückliches und ein sinnerfülltes Dasein sind deckungsgleich.

Vivre les malheurs d'avance, c'est les subir deux fois. Le moment présent était un moment de joie, il ne fallait pas l'empoisonner.

Le lycée ne fut plus qu'un immense vaisseau bouillonnant de la joie furieuse de dix mille enfants qui venaient de retrouver leur jeunesse.