I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

She felt as if she had been on the outside of happiness her whole life.

I’m more beautiful than anybody else,” she said brokenly, “why can’t I be happy?

And she finds it difficult to believe — that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.

When I look in the mirror, I know I’m looking at someone who isn’t sure she deserves to be loved at all.

Her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

In vain she told herself that he was unworthy any woman's trust and love, still the unconquerable sentiment that once made her happiness now remained to become her torment.

But hers was a strange heart, sad in its very nature, and she could never weep and ease it as other women do, for her tears never brought her comfort.

The happiness which is lacking makes one think even the happiness one has unbearable.

Deep feeling sounded in her voice. I had no doubt that the feeling was partly sincere. Still, there was something unreal about it. I suspected that she'd been playing tricks with her emotions for a long time, until none of them was quite valid.

She's one of those people who flinch from the very idea of happiness — in her mind nothing could be more boring or bourgeois.

He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him.

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

That poor creature’s unhappiness was doubtless in great measure due to the conviction that in missing love and marriage she had missed everything.