Happiness Quote by Thomas de Quincey

De Quincey cuts against the cheap caricature of the drug user as a grinning hedonist. In one brisk sentence, he reframes opium not as a party trick but as a mood: laughter can’t survive sustained contact with it, because even its "pleasures" arrive wearing funeral clothes. The line works because it yokes an apparently simple moral observation to an aesthetic judgment. Opium doesn’t just damage; it edits the emotional palette, replacing brightness with weight.

The phrasing is doing covert work. "Nobody" reads like a public-service maxim, but "who deals much" slides in the language of commerce and habit: opium is something you trade in, manage, accumulate. That choice hints at the 19th-century reality of laudanum as an ordinary commodity, medically sanctioned, widely available, and therefore dangerously easy to fold into everyday life. De Quincey isn’t describing an exotic vice at the margins; he’s diagnosing a respectable culture’s quiet dependence.

Then comes the twist: the pleasures are "grave and solemn". Pleasure is supposed to be light, even a little indecent. By giving it a "complexion" - a face, a cast, a bodily tint - he suggests opium rewrites the user’s very physiognomy, turning enjoyment into something ceremonious and funereal. The subtext is personal and literary: as the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey is both witness and stylist, translating addiction into a gothic sensibility where ecstasy and dread share a bloodstream. The sentence is less warning label than verdict: opium offers consolation, but it bills you in seriousness.