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Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
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“Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.”

O. Henry

Source
The Gift of the Magi
Date
1905
Meaning

Meaning of “Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and…”

O. Henry turns Della’s financial distress into a comic-sad observation that ordinary life often mixes sorrow, small complaints and happiness rather than arriving in a single emotional register.

Source context

Where does it come from?

The Gift of the Magi, Project Gutenberg #7256. The narrator offers the line just after Della counts her $1.87 and cries on the couch before Christmas; it is humorous literary narration within a story of poverty, love and gift-giving.

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FunnyHard TimesLifeLoveMoneyShortPerspective
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Time is a great deal more than money.
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“Time is a great deal more than money.”

Arnold Bennett · How to Live on 24 Hours a Day · 1908
Meaning & context

Bennett treats time as the more fundamental resource because money can be gained or lost within time, whereas each passing hour is the fixed medium in which every other activity occurs.

Source details

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, opening discussion of the daily allotment of time. The represented public-domain Project Gutenberg text is #2274; the line is conduct-of-life rhetoric, not a literal economic equivalence.

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Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it.
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“Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it.”

Jerome K. Jerome · The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow · 1886
Meaning & context

Romantic love is compared to an unavoidable childhood illness, making intense emotion comic by treating it as something people catch, endure, and eventually recover from.

Source details

The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, “On Being in Love”; the comparison opens the essay’s mock-medical treatment of romance.

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there falls along with him a whole wing of the palace of our life.
Image design Rose Studio
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“there falls along with him a whole wing of the palace of our life.”

Robert Louis Stevenson · Memories and Portraits · 1887
Meaning & context

The death of a close friend is pictured as structural loss inside the survivor’s own life because shared memory, recognition and companionship disappear with that person.

Source details

Memories and Portraits; Project Gutenberg #381. The surrounding passage describes friendship, mortality and memory; the architectural metaphor is kept as grief writing rather than literal psychology.

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If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside.
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“If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett · A Little Princess · 1905
Voice: Fictional character · Sara Crewe
Meaning & context

Dignity is separated from possessions and appearance, locating self-worth in conduct and inner standards when external status has been stripped away.

Source details

A Little Princess; Sara uses an imagined inner identity to preserve dignity during poverty and mistreatment.

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They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing.
Image design Golden Hour
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“They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing.”

Kahlil Gibran · The Madman · 1918
Meaning & context

The grave-digger’s observation uses dark humor to contrast conventional responses to death with a narrator who approaches the cemetery from another perspective.

Source details

The Madman, “The Grave-Digger”; the line is spoken by the grave-digger to the narrator.