I have been very happy, very rich, very beautiful, much adulated, very famous, and very unhappy.

happiness—I have experienced happiness. It was contentment. There was a period in my life when I was very content and looked it. There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.

I feel that I've had a happy life, not a very useful life, but a happy one.

So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.

I know what love is. There was a happy time when I didn't, but bitter experience has taught me.

Life has been very hard on me, but, at the same time, it has taught me a great deal.

It is a kind of happiness to know just how unhappy we could be.

If one of the best ways to appreciate life is to have an unhappy childhood, I was very fortunate.

If happiness is liking the life one lives, I can say I have been happy, and still am.

It is a kind of happiness to know how unhappy we must be.

Right now I'm as close to happy as I can be without a husband to love, I started to work on this book, looking back over a life which, after thinking about for months and months, I have no regrets about. Plenty of mistakes, some bad days, and, most resonant of all, years of joy - hard, but joyous all the same - fighting for the rights of my brothers and sisters everywhere; America, Africa, all over the world, years where pleasure and pain were mixed together. I knew then, and I still do, that the happiness I felt, and still feel, as we moved forward together was of a kind that very few people ever experience. But what I like most of all about the way things are now is that I have enough financial security to know that I can't be pushed into doing anything I don't want to. When I release a new album or video it'll be because I'm proud and want to share it - no other reason. (p 175)

The more ups and downs, the more joy I feel. The greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel.

even the unhappiest life has its sunny moments and its little flowers of happiness between sand and stone.

Life has taught me to be helpful, honest with myself. It has helped me to be able to make a contribution when I can, know that there are ups and downs in life. It’s not always up.