Americans were so enthusiastic on first meeting; I'd forgotten that enthusiasm didn't mean anything. The cliche among Europeans was that friendships with Americans didn't go anywhere.

Our idea of happiness may be the very thing that’s preventing us from being happy.

Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America.

"You hate America, don't you?" she said.
"That would be as silly as loving it," I said. "It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will."

Your life will never be the same, but happiness again is still possible. Never being happy again is a statement about the future. But no one can predict the future. All they can know for sure is that they are unhappy today. It helps to say, "I'm unhappy today," and leave it at that.

It is impossible to derive happiness from the company of those whom we deprive of happiness.

And I think the consequences of this for the Europeans are going to be horrific. They really — this has cut into the notion that they can depend totally on America, even in a crisis.

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

I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.

I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.

we could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

Unless one is happy, one cannot bestow happiness on others.

The most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.