ARIEL GORE

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

I've been thinking about disowning some of my genes lately. I have a few healthy, happy, long-living optimists in my family tree - most of them fans of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, a major champion of positive thinking. But I've got plenty of ancestors who played out more tortured hands.

In all of my looking at happiness, one thing I noticed right away is that the opposite of happiness isn't unhappiness or even depression, it's anxiety. It is something that can constantly block our happiness, or our chance to reach that sort of meditative state in our work or our home lives.

They say change gets more difficult as we get older - each year we're more stuck in our ways, more reluctant to learn something new.

I always do like seeing other people dance in their cars. It's one of the things that makes me happy.

Researchers warn us against walking out on married life without a dang good reason.

When you study postpartum depression, there is a very clear understanding that in communities where you see more support, there is less depression.

A lot of positive psychology is stuck in being the psychology of privilege, and I reject that.

Conventional wisdom tells us we'll only be happier after a divorce if the marriage itself was a war zone.

I'm sure there were plenty of loving, attentive mothers in the 'me generation,' but none of them lived at my house.

New Agers have always told us that we create our own realities. Mind over matter.

The first person who ever told me that happiness was work was this manic-depressive artist I knew when I was in my 20s. I was like, 'What are you talking about? Happiness just happens. That's even the root of that word. How could it be work?'

I think there are different kinds of happiness. We know when we're happy a lot of the time, but then there are those moments that have more of an afterglow, when the happiness has more depth.

In our cultural history, all emotions have been more culturally acceptable to women.

Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn't actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.

In my experience, staying in a marriage that my ex and I both agreed had all its best moments behind it was epically depressing.

I've never been socially outgoing, but I suspect I've gotten more and more ambivalent about making new friends. I'm irritated by how-do-you-do chit-chat, but that's how new relationships usually begin.

My own habit had always been to write about the things that ticked me off in a given day. If I kept a journal at all, I kept it to vent.

I don't know if my mother was a narcissist - or bi-polar or borderline. Those were words she tossed around over the years.

Looking for the perfect day is not going to make us happy, because that day isn't going to come.

Some caregivers want to reciprocate the care they themselves received as children.

Settling other people's land is an American tradition.

A lot of women make choices based on how they saw their mother's choices working out, how they saw the choices of the women elders in their lives working out. There's some rebellion in that, but there's also some deep reflection.

Everything is freedom and everything is loneliness. Make your choice and let the rest fall away.

One thing that blocks flow is self-consciousness.