In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.
Jeanette Winterson
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All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy
Don’t allow man to be happy. Happiness is self contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy of living. Take away from them whatever is dear or important to them. Never let them have what they want [….]Unhappy men will come to you. They’ll need you. They’ll come to you for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man’s soul-and the space is yours to fill.
Ayn Rand
Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there's no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you'll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone's nightmares come true.
Jeanette Winterson
A child gets sick with a chronic disease of unhappiness not from unhappy circumstances but from unhappy people around him. Unhappy people cannot raise happy children; it’s impossible.
Simon Soloveychik
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it.
George Bernard Shaw
Winterson, Jeanette
Winthrop, John
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