“Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.”

“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.”

“To see someone hurt, to really understand that, is the same as being hurt yourself. To see someone happy is the the same as being happy. To feel love, the same as feeling loved. To see someone die, the same as dying. We're one. We're built that way. It's in our bones." ~Carlton from TimeTripper Book three: Blindsighted by Stefan Petrucha”

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”

“What is best about our lives -the moments when we are, as we would put it, at our happiest- is both pleasant and deeply unpleasant. Happiness is not a feeling; it is a way of being. If we focus on the feelings, we will miss the point.”

“When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.”