Happiness quotation from Virginia Woolf.

Many scenes have come & gone unwritten, since it is today the 4th Sept, a cold grey blowy day, made memorable by the sight of a kingfisher, & by my sense, waking early, of being again visited by “the spirit of delight.” “Rarely rarely comest thou, spirit of delight.” That was I singing this time last year; & sang so poignantly that I have never forgotten it, or my vision of a fin rising on a wide blank sea. No biographer could possibly guess this important fact about my life in the late summer of 1926: yet biographers pretend they know people.
-- Virginia Woolf, Diaries, September 4, 1927

This quotation is perhaps only glancingly related to the general topic of happiness, but it's very significant to my personal happiness. First, because September 4 is my wedding anniversary, it has special meaning; and also because when I was writing my second book, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, and thinking constantly about the nature of biography, these lines had enormous influence on me. In fact, I used this quotation, along with my favorite quotation from Winston Churchill, to introduce the book.

It makes me happy to reread that paragraph, and to revisit what I was thinking about then.

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Comments

[Toast]

September 4th is my wedding anniversary as well. On the subject of happiness, well, as I remarked that evening: "Happiness? Happiness is having a wife who justifies buying you three bottles of high-end liquor for your fourth anniversary on the grounds that they have flowers on the label and a nice bouquet, and then follows that up by enthusiastically endorsing the idea of going to Buffalo Wild Wings for an NFL Opening Night-themed anniversary dinner."

[iHanna]

Great quote. I just bought her diaries and I'm starting to read them now.

[mathialee]

didn'she kill herself in the end? that all these "rare visits from the spirit of delight" ultimately couldn't save her from her inevitable?

[mathialee]

Hmmm dunno wat kind of co-incidence this is, but on the 4th of Sept (it's the 10th of September that i've discovered your page) , I wrote a piece on my blog, wondering if people like Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Anna Karenina (even though she's ficticious, i think many people are like her) could escape their eventual suicide (or suicide attempts)

http://mathialee.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!78A6E3198A7C8D0D!849.entry