No child should ever be too sad to play.

The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills. ("The Striding Place")

I remembered those frantic seconds when I__ thought all I loved and knew, all that was Sydney Sage, would be lost from this world. My battered friends and I had just had a brush with death, dancing with this evil. We__ destroyed it, but it was terrifying how touch and go it all had been. At any moment, the Strigoi could have gained the advantage and killed one or all of us. Life and death were inextricably bound together, and we wavered between them. But we__ triumphed over death tonight. We were alive, and the world was beautiful. Life was beautiful, and I refused to waste mine.

There were happy days, with watermelon, and sad days of whiskey.

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

Sadness is not the beginning or end of a process, but the lag between pleasure and happiness.