Happiness Quote by Bessie Head

Head turns the old hierarchy of “sanity” over “madness” into a rigged contest and then refuses to play. The voice is half-confessional, half-side-eye: “round the bend” and “can’t be all there” borrow the blunt, commonsense language people use to police anyone who doesn’t behave legibly. Then she spikes it with a strange, almost ecstatic image - a “gigantic light” descending from the sky - the kind of visionary experience that gets dismissed as delusion in ordinary conversation and pathologized in institutional settings. The wit is in the pivot: even if the diagnosis sticks, she’s still choosing the feeling.

The subtext is less “mental illness is romantic” than “normality is a thin credential when it can’t make you livable to yourself.” Head frames happiness as a form of evidence, an argument against a world that wants inner life to be tidy, rational, and socially acceptable. “Mighty happy” is pointedly unliterary; it sounds like someone insisting on a small, stubborn truth in the face of experts, neighbors, and gossip.

Context matters: Head’s work is haunted by exile, poverty, and the bureaucratic cruelty of apartheid-era southern Africa, along with the real precariousness of her mental health. In that landscape, “sane” can mean compliant, flattened, surviving in ways that cost you your interior freedom. The line lands because it refuses tragedy as the only available genre. If the world offers you misery with a clean bill of health, she’ll take joy with a cracked edge - and call it the better bargain.