The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.

Joy and sorrow come from the same root: caring about something that can be lost. If you love a person, a place, or a piece of work, you've agreed, whether you meant to or not, to feel pain when it changes, ends, or breaks. The quote asks us to stop treating grief as a malfunction in an otherwise happy life and see it as the cost of having anything worth grieving.

This view is old. Buddhist thought builds on impermanence, and the tragic tradition in literature has long held that depth of feeling runs both ways. It also fits Andre Dubus III's work as an American novelist and memoirist, which is full of ordinary people dealing with loss, anger, and tenderness. I can't point to the exact source of this wording, so it's best treated as attributed.

In practice, think of someone deciding whether to adopt a dog, even though they're still hurting from losing the last one. The quote suggests that the coming grief isn't a reason to refuse the years of happiness. It's part of the same bargain, and accepting that can make the sadness feel less like failure.