Happiness Falls Quotes

“Our brains are hardwired to want resolution, to want the answer. The bigger and broader the mystery, the deeper the satisfaction when it’s resolved (a variation on Dad’s low baseline theory). They turn the pages and join the search party, to accelerate the process of solving the puzzle, of turning it into a different kind of story.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“It's a crazy world out there. Be curious. - Stephen Hawking”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“There are moments when something we’ve idealized all our lives changes and becomes something less.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“For the rest of our lives, every time one of us goes somewhere and doesn’t return on time, doesn’t let the others know where we are, we will remember this time, what can happen. And we will fall apart.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“I believe there’s a fine line (if any) between optimism and willful idiocy, so I try to avoid optimism altogether, lest I fall over the line mistakenly.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“You don’t realize how much one depressed, stressed-out person in a house affects the whole family’s mood until it’s been lifted.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Don’t let what you already have be the baseline. Think of yourself before you gained what you have, and remind yourself how much you want that, what you already have—your spouse/partner, your family, your house, your job. Imagine you in an alternate universe where you don’t have your family, can’t have your kids or your partner, how desperate in that alternate-you would be to get what you have.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“But that begs the questions of 1) what is it about women as victims that makes these stories so popular? and, more importantly, at least from the standpoint of perpetuating the image of adult men as strong and powerful, 2) what is it about men as victims that makes these stories seemingly implausible and rare?”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“I lost a World - the other day! Has Anybody found? - Emily Dickinson, 1896”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“What bullshit nonsense, this whole blaming everything on moms. Is it any wonder that women are increasingly deciding not to have children, why the birth rate is declining drastically in both the US and Korea?”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“An official codified declaration that this person you love is incompetent, not a full citizen, not a moral being capable of telling right from wrong. Like one of my little-kid logic chains gone wrong: you can’t speak or point; which means, therefore, you get a low score on an IQ test; which means, therefore, you’re less intelligent; which means, therefore, you’re less worthy; which means, therefore, you’re less human. In the eyes of everyone in that room, those words destroyed his humanity.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Because when you can’t talk, people assume you can’t understand and talk about you in front of you. It’s humiliating. Just thinking about it today, twenty years later, it really just…It’s still hard to talk about.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“And yet, once we went inside, we had to carry on with the typical everyday stuff that seemed too insignificant to continue—think about dinner, drink water, use the bathroom, take out contact lenses. That’s the thing about biology; it doesn’t give a shit about outside emergencies.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“déjà vu is a memory-sequencing miscue, an eerie byproduct of your brain trying to reconcile the accidental activation of the wrong memory bank.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Have you noticed how different things sound out loud versus inside your head? Sometimes you think something and it makes so much sense, seems brilliant, even, but once you speak or write it, the eloquence disappears. I used to blame it on things getting lost in verbalization, the inadequacy of words to fully capture abstract ideas, but I think it’s also that seeing/hearing the words triggers you to evaluate them, exposing flaws that the initial excitement blocked.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“please don’t make assumptions before you know, based on the incorrect “nonverbal” label, based on how someone looks and acts.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“what Koreans call jeong. It’s hard to explain in English; it’s not any particular emotion—not affection or even love—but a complex bond defined by its depth and history: that sense of belonging to the same whole, your fates intertwined, impossible to sever no matter how much you may want”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Was this a different recording made by a different person? How many bird-watchers on an island in the river could there be?”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Counterintuitive Case Study #3: Things or Experiences?: You have $1000. You can buy something to keep, or use it for an experience (trip, concert). Most assume the object will provide happiness for longer than a fleeting experience. Again, wrong. A study found that the happiness levels are equal at first, but as time goes by, people’s satisfaction with their material purchases decreased, whereas it increased for their experiences. In other words, people’s memories of experiences made them happier longer than owning objects.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“how can you not have expectations of a child? What is a child if not as-yet-unrealized potential personified?)”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“There’s a Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last,” about a book-lover desperate for more time so he can do nothing but read. He gets his wish; he’s the lone survivor of a global nuclear holocaust and ends up at a library with a lifetime’s worth of intact books. He’s excitedly sorting through them when his glasses fall off and shatter, leaving him unable to read.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“it’s like there was all this built-up emotion in the room that had nowhere to go and needed to be discharged, like static electricity.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“I’ve been working on something, trying to capture my intuitive understanding of the relativity of emotions, but I was using subtraction and getting the same values for situations I know are not. I think your quotient insight’s exactly what I was missing. You’re brilliant.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Dad’s eighties-rock playlist I pretend to tolerate but actually like.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Besides, maybe miracles didn’t follow statistical probabilities. Miracles defied logic—that’s what made them miracles, wasn’t it?—”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Our excessive politeness was, of course, a withholding of intimacy, meant to wound. Speaking overly formally is a great way to punish your parents because it communicates distance and also has the benefit of making you feel grown-up, but it’s not anything they can complain about.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“and, truth be told, even prided myself on it—but with a different spin, that I was an independent thinker, that I cared more about authenticity and honesty than tact.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“HQ = how does your actual experience (numerator) compare with your mindset (denominator)?”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“people’s memories of experiences made them happier longer than owning objects.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“I lost a World—the other day! Has Anybody found? —Emily Dickinson (1896) One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams. “What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well …” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
The Little Prince (1943) It’s a crazy world out there. Be curious. —Stephen Hawking,
The Universe in a Nutshell (2001)”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls