Joylessness Quotes

“There’s something so joyless about the left these days,’ Tony continued, ‘so forbidding and self-denying. And policing. No one’s having any fun, we’re all just sitting around scolding each other for doing too much or not enough--and it’s like, what kind of vision for the future is that? Where’s the hope? Where’s the humanity? We’re all aspiring to be monks when we could be aspiring to be lovers.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“At the great feast there is always the outsider, the stranger to joy...

[from 'Morning']”
― Louise Glück, The First Four Books of Poems

“I thought about my complicity
all the time or not at all. My role in America’s joyless abundance.”
― H.R. Webster