“Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.”
Source: Giovanni's Room
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James Baldwin163
(1924-1987) writer from the United States 1924–1987Related quotes
“It's time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”
Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter
Source: Songs of Leonard Cohen, Herewith: Music, Words and Photographs
Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru
#40541, Part 41
Seventy Seven Thousand Service-Trees series 1-50 (1998)
Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist
Source: "Intuitions" (October 1932), published in Youthful Writings (1976)
“The hell with it. Who never knew
the price of happiness will not be happy.”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017) Russian poet, film director, teacher
"Lies" (1952), line 11; Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (trans.) Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 52.
Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France
First Journal of Travel (1840)
Context: Nothing troubled the charm and silence of this solitude. Making the most serious reflections on what we behold, and on our present position, I said to myself: Thus does life also pass away, now calm, now agitated, but at last the end is attained. Happy, ah, thrice happy they who can then look out to the never-ending future with calm and confidence, who can cast themselves on the bosom of God, the Center of our felicity.
“What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.”
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) author, critic and playwright from the United States
As quoted in French Ways and Their Meaning http://www.archive.org/details/frenchwaysandthe00wharuoft (1919) by Edith Wharton, p. 65 <br class="br">Variant: <br class="br">What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending. <br class="br">As quoted in A Backward Glance http://archive.org/details/backwardglance030620mbp (1934) by Edith Wharton, p. 147