Happiness Quote by Antonio Tabucchi

A small act of refusal disguised as modest contentment. Tabucchi’s line begins with a hard “No,” a conversational door-slam that matters more than the rest of the sentence. It suggests an unseen proposition - fame’s temptations, political pressure, the romance of the bohemian writer, the expectation that a “real” artist should be elsewhere, doing something grander, riskier, more mythic. He answers by shrinking the frame on purpose: not destiny, not legacy, not the tortured genius routine, just “the life I’ve chosen.”

That phrase is doing double duty. On its face it’s autonomy, a calm assertion that adulthood means selecting your constraints and owning them. Underneath, it’s a rebuke to the cultural machinery that treats choices as either self-actualization or failure. He refuses both narratives. The follow-up - “I’m a university teacher and I like my job” - lands like a punchline precisely because it’s so unliterary. Tabucchi, a writer associated with slippery identities and moral unease, plants his flag in the workaday world. The repetition of “I” isn’t narcissism; it’s a defensive grammar, a way of reclaiming agency from whatever chorus is trying to rewrite his life.

Contextually, it also reads as a European intellectual’s quiet protest against the celebrity-author era: the insistence that thinking, teaching, and ordinary labor are not a consolation prize but a chosen stance. The power here is the anti-myth: happiness as a disciplined, almost political preference.