Happiness Quote by Roman Polanski

Happiness, for Polanski, isn’t a destination; it’s a trigger. The line has the blunt simplicity of a confession you make only when you’re tired of pretending you’re fine. It works because it flips the usual self-help script: joy isn’t framed as healing, but as the moment your body braces for impact. That “terrible feeling” is the shadow of the drop, the sense that good luck is never stable, only provisional.

As a director, Polanski built a career on exactly this mechanism. His films keep promising normalcy - a marriage, a home, a baby, a polite apartment building - then tighten the screws until the everyday becomes hostile. “Whenever I get happy” sounds like the first act; “I always have a terrible feeling” is the second, when the camera starts lingering a beat too long and you realize the room has no exits. It’s not just pessimism; it’s suspense as a worldview.

Context sharpens the line into something harder: Polanski’s biography is marked by real catastrophe and public infamy, a life where safety is repeatedly revoked, sometimes by history, sometimes by his own actions. The quote reads less like a plea for sympathy than a self-portrait of permanent hypervigilance: happiness as an uncanny lull before the next knock at the door. In his hands, dread isn’t a genre choice. It’s the default setting.