A Quote by Sherman Alexie
Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze.
Related Quotes
In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.
Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty.
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually step back and talk about life like the Anton Chekhov quote. I prefer Anton Chekhov to Lev Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a theory that he was proving and he proved it. Chekhov is more ambiguous.
When Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, what he meant was that there are no happy families.
I agree with the Lev Tolstoy quote completely, but I also feel like there's more to it. What is a happy family and an unhappy family? We're probably both of those things at the same time.
Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
... good teachers, like Tolstoy's happy families, are alike everywhere.
Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.
The disgusting truth is that some of the less-educated families in the Caucasus hate and despise Russians simply because they are Russian, just as some less-educated Russian families feel the same way about people from the Caucasus.
Every unhappy genius dreams to be in the place of a happy fool.
Drama's unhappy, and playing someone unhappy would make me unhappy.
A child gets sick with a chronic disease of unhappiness not from unhappy circumstances but from unhappy people around him. Unhappy people cannot raise happy children; it's impossible.
Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious.
The women here are the ones that hold the families together. So if my mom were to be unhappy with me, in a way, it would be like I would have lost my entire family.
The Royal Ballet School looked after me very well, they were like my family, and the company gave me everything. But I was unhappy and I didn't know how to express it.
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