@Outshine on twitter, quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918 - 2008), Russian Novelist, chronicler of the Gulags in Soviet Russia.

Well, Solzhenitsyn, I loved your novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich but this quote doesn’t agree with me at all.  Happiness sneaks up on you when you’re not looking. It’s a thing that bubbles up from inside and around you, it doesn’t seem to me to be a thing that I can turn on and off.  I can decide to not let my unhappiness suck me in, let depression pull me down into it or I can declair that the actions of others or external events will not be allowed to impinge on my mood but it doesn’t seem to me that you can make a choice to be happy, you either are or are not, like in the same way that you’re tired: you can do things to help bring about that state, but I don’t think being in a state of happiness or sadness is in an induvidual’s power. You think, I’m sitting in my room, I’ll go outside, that’ll cheer me up, but you can’t decide that the day will be pleasent for you and that you will smile and enjoy it.  There’s a level of pretension I can’t get over in deciding to “be happy” and to be immplacable in your happiness.  I’m not articulating this well here, it’s something I think about fairly often, that cyclical work of happiness and not-happiness.  Enough of this.