The last introvert in a world of extroverts. Silence: my response to both emptiness and saturation. But silence frightens people. I had to learn how to talk. Out of politeness.

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.

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

When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.

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

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.

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