No Happily Ever After Quotes

1. "A happy ending. Huh. I thought that was why we were here. Now. Five hundred years into Earth's future. So we could start over, and live happily-ever-after. It wasn't turning out that way, was it?"
Author: A.B. Shepherd

2. "A memory came to me. One time, in middle school, a famous author came to talk to our class and give a writing workshop. One of the things she told us about writing a novel was that the story should be about what the main character wants. Dorothy wants to go home to Kansas. George Milton wants a farm of his own. Amelia Sedley wants to marry her darling George and live happily ever after. The end of the story, according to the famous author, is when the character either gests what he wants or realizes he's never going to get it. Or sometimes, she said, like Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, realizes she doesn't actually want what she thought she wanted all along. pg. 324 of Bewitching"
Author: Alex Flinn

3. "Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after -- like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word"
Author: Alice Munro

4. "Love is like a game of chess. You're white. He's black. You wait for him to make a move, while staring into his handsome, melting-you-on-the-inside eyes, then realize what a dummy he is to not tell you straight out to go first. The beginning is the crush stage. You begin to realize how much you want to defeat him, or make him fall in love with you. By the time you get to the heat of the game, you both moved and are hopefully dating. If you haven't forfeit then because you don't want to be cheated on, you make another move- head on shoulder, hand holding, etc. Black makes another move-he gives you his jacket on a freezing night. By the endgame, he either realizes how stupid he was to play with you and forfeits, or he realizes how smart you are and lets you defeat him (and love you). By the time you win, you're married to him. A happily ever after game of chess."
Author: Amrita Ramanathan

5. "So the fact tht anyone would ever suggest that Arab women are dominated and demeaned is really quite ludicrous. In this part of the world, She's just Not That Into Him. We're the ones who make a pantomime of the wedding, and play at happily ever after....The men might think they have the upper hand, they may believe they've nabbed themselves a prime piece of arm candy, but we've got his 'potential as a provider' wrapped around our little fingers. Oh yes, we're the smart ones."
Author: Amy Mowafi

6. "People snare when I tell them that I'm an emotional prostitute. But after my rebuttal, they begin to realize that they are one too. Like me, they have pimped their emotions for the affections of another. Like me, they've gone through life tormented by the idea of living a happily ever after, not realizing that the ever after isn't so happy."
Author: Beatrice McClearn

7. "Once again, I don't quite know where I'm headed, Steph. It seems that every few years I'm shoveling up the pieces of my life and starting from scratch all over. No matter what I do or how hard I try I can;t seem to reach the dizzy heights of happiness, success, and security. like so many people do. And I'm not talking about becoming a millionaire and living happily ever after. I just mean reaching a point in my life that I can stop what I;m doing, take a look around me, breathe a sigh of relief and think: I'm where I want to be now."
Author: Cecelia Ahern

8. "With my guitar, I could write my own stories, my own poems, and my own destiny. No one could take away the feelings, the emotions or the truth of my notes. They could hide secrets and provoke images of words that never should be whispered. I could compose the melody of my aching heart and write into it my own happily ever after since no one seemed to think after all my suffering I deserved one. That's okay, I would make my own."
Author: Christine Zolendz

9. "I'm not a sucker for happily ever afters, but if these two characters don't get theirs I might climb inside this e-reader and lock them both inside that damn garage forever."
Author: Colleen Hoover

10. "Not everyone gets a happily every after. Life is real and sometimes it's ugly and you just have to learn how to cope."
Author: Colleen Hoover

11. "Sure. I' ll go out and start drinking blood right now . Then I' ll come back with fangs and a melanin deficiency and rule the world. And also, David willfall so madly in love with me that the Signet will pick me as his Queen and we' ll live happily ever after in bloodsucking bliss among the sparklyunicorns."
Author: Dianne Sylvan

12. "We were so committed to solving this thing. Because how could two people so in love NOT end up happily ever after? It HAD to work. Didn't it?"
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

13. "How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after?It had to work. Didn't it? Reunited with fresh hopes, we'd share a fewdeliriously happy days together. Or sometimes even weeks."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

14. "So do we get our happily ever after now?" I ask. He kneels down in front of me and grabs my hands and kisses the tops of them. "Yes, our version of happily ever after," he answers with sparkling blue eyes. "The version with whips and cuffs, right?" I ask. "That's the only kind of happily ever after I want, love."
Author: Ella Dominguez

15. "Happiness, you see, its just an illusion of Fate, a heavenly sleight of hand designed to make you believe in fairy tales. But there's no happily ever after. You'll only find happy endings in books. Some books."
Author: Ellen Hopkins

16. "For the answers make sense only in relation to the questions which they answer; the questions, furthermore, make sense only in relation to the concrete experiences of reality from which they have arisen; and the concrete experiences, together with their linguistic articulation, finally make sense only in the cultural context which sets limits to both the direction and range of intelligible differentiation. Only the complex of experience question answer as a whole is a constant of consciousness . . . No answer, thus, is the ultimate truth in whose possession mankind could live happily forever after, because no answer can abolish the historical process of consciousness from which it has emerged."
Author: Eric Voegelin

17. "Here and there and not just in books we catch glimpses of a world of once upon a time and they lived happily ever after, of a world where there is a wizard to give courage and a heart, an angel with a white stone that has written on it our true and secret name, and it is so easy to dismiss it all that it is hardly worth bothering to do. ... But if the world of the fairy tale and our glimpses of it here and there are only a dream, they are one of the most haunting and powerful dreams that the world has ever dreamed..."
Author: Frederick Buechner

18. "There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final volume should leave the reader with the feeling that he has gone through the defining circumstances of Main Character's life. The leading character in a series can wander off into another book and a new adventure better even than this one. Main Character cannot, at the end of your multivolume work. (Or at least, it should seem so.) His life may continue, and in most cases it will. He may or may not live happily ever after. But the problems he will face in the future will not be as important to him or to us, nor the summers as golden."
Author: Gene Wolfe

19. "How could I let this happen? How could I let it get this far? I never thought Malyn would have the same feelin's for me as I did for her. I'm dead, for goodness sakes. It's not like we can live happily ever after. I can't live at all."
Author: Janae Mitchell

20. "Ariel, Belle, Cinderella, Jasmine... none of them had mothers."I was still wasn't following, but she continued, obviously excited. "When I was little, I used to think that meant that life had to make it up to them, for taking their mothers away, and so that's why they ended up having the whole fairy-tale happily-ever-after magic happen to them. The deserved it more than other girls." She looked at me intently. "Life will make it up to you, Anna."
Author: Jessi Kirby

21. "Once Upon A Time" I began. We made it through three stories before she was in a deep sleep. In the end, she probably didn't have a better grasp on our legal system, racism, or social complexity. However, she now knew that sometimes the most loyal friend you could have was a mouse, that sometimes people weren't always who they seemed, even if their eyes were allegedly only bigger to see you with, and that everyone had the capacity to live happily ever after. It wasn't in her lesson plan, and maybe it wasn't all true, but it was important."
Author: Jessica Fortunato

22. "He is not a prince, and you are not a princess, and real life is not a fairytale. Happily-ever-afters are not handed out on silver platters. They have to be earned."
Author: Jillian Eaton

23. "None of us live happily forever after. But we can choose to be happy today."
Author: Jim C. Hines

24. "Do you know why happily ever after is a lie?" Snow asked. "Because life is change."
Author: Jim C. Hines

25. "Life's about a hell of a lot more than being happy. It's about feeling the full range of stuff: happiness, sadness, anger, grief, love, hate. If you try to shut one of those off, you shut them all off. I don't want to be happy. I know I won't live happily ever after. I want more than that, something richer. I want to go right up close to the beauty and the ugliness. I want to see it all, know it all, understand it all. The richness and the powerty, the joy and the cruelty, the sweetness and the sadness. That's the best way I can honour my friends who died."
Author: John Marsden

26. "I opened a book and in I strode.Now nobody can find me.I've left my chair, my house, my road,My town and my world behind me.I'm wearing the cloak, I've slipped on the ring,I've swallowed the magic potion.I've fought with a dragon, dined with a kingAnd dived in a bottomless ocean.I opened a book and made some friends.I shared their tears and laughterAnd followed their road with its bumps and bendsTo the happily ever after.I finished my book and out I came.The cloak can no longer hide me.My chair and my house are just the same,But I have a book inside me."
Author: Julia Donaldson

27. "Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper "One more time" in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality."
Author: L.R. Knost

28. "...maybe just once in this life someone loves us for the us we don't even know how to be yet. And if we lose him too early--in the name of all the promises in the world: a new job, a new city, an old love offering us happily ever after--we may just lose that chance to be our best self."
Author: Laura Dave

29. "At this point in the story, I feel obliged to interrupt and give you one last warning. As I said at the very beginning, the book you are holding in your hands does not have a happy ending. It may appear now that Count Olaf will go to jail and that the three Baudelaire youngsters will live happily ever after with Justice Strauss, but it is not so. If you like, you may shut the book this instant and not read the unhappy ending that is to follow. You may spend the rest of your life believing that the Baudelaires triumphed over Count Olaf and lived the rest of their lives in the house and library of Justice Strauss, but that is not how the story goes."
Author: Lemony Snicket

30. "She found it soothing to get caught up in a brightly colored, plastic world where all that mattered was how much you ate and exercised, where pain and anguish were suffered over no greater tragedy than push-ups, where people spoke intensely about calories and sobbed joyfully over lost kilos. And then they all lived happily, skinnily ever after."
Author: Liane Moriarty

31. "Meditation is practiced by traditions all over the world. It is not a Buddhist practice per se, or even a religious practice, and has existed for centuries. The only reason you and I ought to practice meditation is because our friend Sid used it as a tool to discover his innate wisdom, and lived happily ever after as a result. We too can touch the wisdom behind our confusion. We too can look at the display on our movie screen, and see it as illusory. Sid is most commonly"
Author: Lodro Rinzler

32. "She stands like she's trouble, and though her jagged haircut is trying too hard to tell me that she doesn't care what I think, the pugnacious set of her mouth tells me everything I need to know about why she got dropped out of all those schools. The hair is what tells me she needs help, all right, but her mouth tells me she doesn't need that much and she probably just needs time to work it out for herself. And I want, want, want to tell her not to sign the paperwork and to instead go out with me and live happily ever after in a tiny apartment in Baltimore because I always liked Baltimore and we could have two poodles, both shaved strangely to attract attention because I can see that's a big part of her, and pretty much eat take out spring rolls every night, because that's a big part of me."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

33. "Single is no longer a lack of options – but a choice. A choice to refuse to let your life be defined by your relationship status but to live every day Happily and let your Ever After work itself out."
Author: Mandy Hale

34. "A gorgeous turquoise eyed blonde came crashing into my life and knocked me off my feet. She's fiery, strong and infuriatingly stubborn. I was hooked. She stained my shirt and stole my heart right in that shop and I haven't been able to get her out of my mind since. She's amazing and I've fallen head over heels in love with her. She's my happily every after."
Author: Marie Coulson

35. "But here I am at this moment, a thirty-four-year-old geek, and against my will and against my reason (although, okay, not against my character), I still want that fucking Cinderella story for myself.More than an amazing, no-one-else-on-the-planet-knows-this secret.More than anything else.I want that happily-ever-after ending I imagined, as a teen, I'd get someday. That daydream I held on to as my prize for surviving those sucky years of adolescence.Dammit, I deserve that ending.It's just that, if I'm truly honest with myself, I can no longer tell if it's Sam, specifically, I want or if it's the nearly two-decade-old fantasy featuring him as the heroic lead.So, at the last second, I cop out."
Author: Marilyn Brant

36. "There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness."
Author: Mary Balogh

37. "I won, goddammit. I beat Kollberg. I beat you. I got everything I goddamn wanted: fame, wealth, power. Shit, I even got the girl.""The problem with happy endings," Tan'elKoth said,"is that nothing is ever truly over.""Fuck that," Hari said."I am living happily ever goddamn after. I am."
Author: Matthew Woodring Stover

38. "It's my own fault, really. For believing in fairy tales. Not that I ever mistook them for actual historical fact, or anything. But I did grow up believing that for every girl, there's a prince out there somewhere. All she has to do is find him. Then it's on with thehappily ever after. So you can only imagine what happened when I found out. That my prince really IS one. A prince. No, I really mean it. He's an actual PRINCE."
Author: Meg Cabot

39. "Tell me a story,' she whispered.'What kind of story?''One that'll make me have good dreams.''Better give me a rating for that dream.''Surprise me.'....'Once upon a time there was a girl...''Not a princess.' 'No. Definitely not. She was too smart to be a princess. Tough, too.''Yeah?''Oh yeah. Stronger than anyone realized.''Does she live happily ever after?''Shouldn't there be something in the middle?''I like to read the ending first. So did she?''Yes."
Author: Melissa Marr

40. "The fairy tale is not the conclusion, but the doorway to a more brilliant reality. Pushed onto a pedestal as the final answer their worth is misshapen and distorted. The world's story may end with a couple living happily ever after but our life in Christ enables the intimacy of the human relationship to illuminate an eternal perfection. In a balanced perspective, neither denigrated nor exalted from their intended place, fairy tales are a lovely and exhilarating part of life."
Author: Natalie Nyquist

41. "It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. And this is the one rebel that they can't break."
Author: Patrick McGoohan

42. "[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived."
Author: Richard Peck

43. "Pretty enough to make Henley the Huntsman want to save me ... but not too pretty, because too pretty is what sets my stepmother off. And she wants me gone - she wanted me gone years ago."Viv twisted restlessly. "I don't know what she's waiting for. Waiting to make him hate me, I guess. Make him loyal to her so he'll cut my heart out when she asks him to ... And then if Henley doesn't kill me, there's the matter of being pretty enough to attract some necrophiliac playboy. Someday my prince will come - and be enamored of my lifeless body. There's some happily-ever-after for you."
Author: Sarah Cross

44. "I mean, without the antagonist, there would be no story! It'd be like: ‘Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to be loved, so she met a prince and got married and lived Happily Ever After, The End'? That's not a story; that's a bumper sticker."
Author: Shannon Hale

45. "Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying."
Author: Sonya Hartnett

46. "But no matter what love throws at you, you have to believe in it. You have ot believe in love stories and prince charmings and happily ever after. That's why I write these songs. Because I think love is FEARLESS."
Author: Taylor Swift

47. "I'm not naive. I know I don't get the happily ever after. My knight in shining armor took the highway detour around this godforsaken shit hole..."
Author: Teresa Mummert

48. "I know i don't get the happily ever after. My knight and shinning armor took the highway detour around this godforsaken shit hole. I've made peace with that. That doesn't mean i'm going to lie down like a doormat and let every cocky prick in the trailer have his way with me." - White Trash Beautiful"
Author: Teresa Mummert

49. "Sorry, dear. This isn´t fairy tale. There´s no happily ever after. Just... ever after."
Author: Wynne Channing

50. "We may have forgotten how to feel. Nobody is teaching us how to live happily ever after, as we've heard in fairy tales."
Author: Yakov Smirnoff

No Happily Ever After Quotes Pictures