Interesting Excerpts from the book “The Illicit Happiness of Other People” by Manu Joseph.

* Reflecting upon an incident:
It is a moment that has no meaning. It is as if the tired charade of human life with its great pursuits of history and wounds and deep convictions has collapsed, and the world has been suddenly revealed as a place that has no point, that does not need the hypothesis of meaning to explain its existence.

  • On language:
    Language is a trap. A dark evolutionary force has created language to limit human thought. The ultimate goal of comics is the same as that of humanity - to break free from language.

  • Train of thought on good and evil:
    Thousands of years ago in the history of mankind, the war between good and evil had ended. And it ended with the complete triumph of evil and a total, irrevocable extermination of good. Evil is cunning, it quickly splits itself into two - into apparent good and evil, so that mankind is under the delusion that the great conflict is still raging and it will not go in search of the truth. All that we think is good - art, love, enlightenment and all that we think is the pursuit of truth is actually a form of evil.

  • On the generic premise of a story:
    In a story, good has to triumph over evil. You cannot start a story by saying that good is finished for ever. You have to give good a change to defeat evil in the end. That’s the con. That’s the structure of every story in the history of stories. Every storyteller has to work within this con.

  • On the pursuit of truth:
    What if the meaning of life was realized ages ago by early men, the whole business of truth settled, and the world today is merely a post enlightenment residue?

  • Reality as a successful delusion:
    Every delusion has an objective, and the objective of a delusion is not merely to colonize one brain but to transmit itself to as many brains as possible. That is the purpose of every delusion, that is how a delusion survives, that is how it succeeds. By spreading, maximizing its colony, like a virus. Any philosophy that can be transmitted to another person is a delusion. If two people believe in the same idea of truth, it is a delusion. Truth is a successful delusion.

  • About human emotions:
    There are thousands of human sentiments and many of them had not been named in any language. Every person has atleast one emotion that only he or she felt and no one else in the world could ever imagine the feeling.