On Happiness for Beginners

Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

- Certain people in life - and not even always ones who deserve it - can just unlock all your doors, somehow. Even if you change the locks or hide the keys. -

- I wanted to be the kind of person that people gave nicknames to. -

- I'd come here for nature. I'd come here to be transformed. And yet for that whole first day of hiking, I listened to celebrity gossip, tales of intra-sorority injustice, and diet tips. -

- All morning, the kids had been talking about "next year," and making plans to come back and do it over again, in a way that made me saddest of all. Because I knew that they wouldn't. A year is an eternity, and they'd never come back. Life would get in the way. -

- What can I say? When your eighty-three-year-old grandmother wants to paint your portrait, you let her. -