Unhappy Endings Quotes

But here in the West, we just have to live with unhappy endings. ~ Nicolas Barreau

I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald's sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her - as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification. ~ John Irving

Unhappy endings can be as cheap as happy endings. ~ David O. Russell

The world wasn't split into unhappy endings and happily ever afters. There were blessings everywhere and a thousand shades of joy all around him. ~ Talia Hibbert

Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film "realistic," everyone knows what that means
it means the movie has an unhappy ending. ~ Chuck Klosterman

But nobody lives in a universal thing called culture. They live only in specific cultures, each of which differ from one another. Plays written and produced in Germany are three times as likely to have tragic or unhappy endings than plays written and produced in the United States. Half of all people in India and Pakistan say they would marry without love, but only 2 percent of people in Japan would do so. Nearly a quarter of Americans say they are often afraid of saying the wrong things in social situations, whereas 65 percent of all Japanese say they are often afraid. In their book Drunken Comportment, Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton found that in some cultures drunken men get into fights, but in some cultures they almost never do. In some cultures drunken men grow more amorous, but in some cultures they do not. ~ David Brooks

Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism lacked. ~ Salman Rushdie

What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere. ~ Joseph Heller

You were right the first time, Cathy. It was a stupid, silly story.
Ridiculous! Only insane people would die for the sake of love. I'll
bet you a hundred to one a woman wrote that junky romantic trash!"
Just a minute ago I'd despised that author for bringing about such a
miserable ending, then there I went, rushing to the defense. "T. M.
Ellis could very well have been a man! Though I doubt any woman writer
in the nineteenth century had much chance of being published, unless
she used her initials, or a man's name. And why is it all men think
everything a woman writes is trivial or trashy-or just plain silly
drivel? Don't men have romantic notions? Don't men dream of finding
the perfect love? And it seems to me, that Raymond was far more
mushy-minded than Lily! ~ V.C. Andrews

Life always has an unhappy ending, but you can have a lot of fun along the way, and everything doesn't have to be dripping in deep significance. ~ Roger Ebert

Your happiness depends on people around you and people you love, but peace of mind you alone can cultivate. Never loose your peace of mind even when unhappy. ~ Bajju

The overall intent is to make everyone sufficiently happy (or in some cases, insufficiently unhappy). ~ Larry Wall

Children who have the freedom to explore a variety of things and discard them when they no longer make sense do not feel like failures when they choose to drop something. Instead they see it as another experience from which to learn a bit about something and a lot about themselves. This is a much better attitude than the child who is forced to stay, being told to suck it up and stick it out, who begins to feel powerless and resentful. As an adult this child is more likely, for example, to stay in an unhappy career so as not to look or feel like a failure, though he will definitely feel trapped. ~ Pam Laricchia

Unhappiness is a contagious disease caused by a chronic deficiency of gratitude. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Even if you are sick or unhappy today, look for the beautiful things life has to offer: the fact that you are living, breathing and capable of loving others is reason enough to celebrate. Life is beautiful anyway. ~ Sanchita Pandey

To not follow the dharma, either intentionally or through lack of awareness, creates a very low level of attention. In this low level of attention we make all kinds of mistakes and we are unhappy no matter what good fortune befalls us. ~ Frederick Lenz

My father, you must know, who was originally a Turkey merchant, but had left off business for some years, in order to retire to, and die upon, his paternal estate in the county of - - , was, I believe, one of the most regular men in every thing he did, whether 'twas matter of business, or matter of amusement, that ever lived. As a small specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave, he had made it a rule for many years of his life, - on the first Sunday-night of every month throughout the whole year, - as certain as ever the Sunday-night came, - to wind up a large house-clock, which we had standing on the back-stairs head, with his own hands: - And being somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age at the time I have been speaking of, - he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month.

It was attended but with one misfortune, which, in a great measure, fell upon myself, and the effects of which I fear I shall carry with me to my grave; namely, that from an unhappy association of ideas, which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up, - but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head. ~ Laurence Sterne

Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us. ~ Anne Lamott

The practice of mindfulness is monitoring your mind all day and all night. It's enjoyable to just remove things that make you unhappy from your mind, to clarify your emotions. ~ Frederick Lenz

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. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover

A happy reader is a sane reader
an unhappy one
well...not so much. ~ Suzanne Steele

This was it. It was pulse-racing, heart-wrenching, dizzying love. The kind that touches every one of your nerve endings and renders you almost insane. The kind I could not give into easily because it already hurt like hell before lift-off. ~ Jessica Thompson

And choosing friends with the right amount of depression, not to stand out too much. Sometimes it is very hard to bear very happy people around you because they remind you of how unhappy you are. ~ Rose S. White

If you find the here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: Remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally ... ~ Eckhart Tolle

When I sealed the deal on Douglass, I thought I had everything I wanted. But I was wrong. You're everything thing I want. Everything I need. ~ Jackie Braun

What you must understand about me, Pudge, is that I'm a deeply unhappy person ~ John Green

Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. ~ Nick Hornby

Hitherto the conception of chemical transmission at nerve endings and neuronal synapses, originating in Loewi's discovery, and with the extension that the work of my colleagues has been able to give to it, can claim one practical result, in the specific, though alas only short, alleviation of the condition of myasthenia gravis, by eserine and its synthetic analogues. ~ Henry Hallett Dale

I've explained to a number of people my observations about how exercise, diet, and sleep influence mood. The usual reaction is a blank expression followed by a change of topic. No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day. You'd feel like an idiot for suffering so many unhappy days while not knowing the cure was so accessible. ~ Scott Adams

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice - that is, until we have stopped saying "It got lost," and say, "I lost it. ~ Sydney J. Harris

He knew that loneliness was poisoning him, so that he grew viler as well as more unhappy. ~ E. M. Forster

I'd love for readers to read what books are about so that if they are expecting happy endings in dark horror novels, they won't reach for the Vallium or something worse! ~ Carole Gill

As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. ~ Milan Kundera

You must understand that you do have the power to change your relationships and your life, but it is likely going to be frightening at first. The alternative is to live a fairly unhappy and unsatisfying life in which fear dictates your choices and their relationships. ~ Randi Kreger

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us. ~ Gloria Steinem

What has changed is that nothing has changed ... that's what has made me more unhappy than everything else. ~ Willie Nelson

When I write, I never know the endings. What I think works in [my] stories is the fact that when I write, I really want to find out what is going on-I'm writing for myself as a reader. It's like when you dream a dream. I want to know what's behind the door. If I navigate, it's from a place that's totally intuitive. ~ Etgar Keret

Like you, I grew up in a remote animist village. But then I went to a strict Catholic education in France. I was perfectly content to accept the grand Shee Yee of the Otherworld and the Lord B, and Jesus and his mother as my spiritual icons as long as I didn't have to spend too long on my knees. I would have settled for a committee. I just wanted order. But once I started to see my own ghosts I understood what these religions were all about. They were clubs set up by people like me to stop themselves from going mad. You know what I really think happens? You die. You wait for your number. There's a bit of time to take care of unfinished business. And you pass on. And, as you don't come back, nobody actually knows what you pass on to. But that description has never been acceptable. People want an ending. They don't want to vanish into thin air. So these great religious gurus made some endings up. The more comfortable and happy your ending, the more members signed up and paid their fees. And the kings and emperors started to add rules and regulations to subjugate the commoners and keep them in line. As so they invented hell and told you if you coveted your neighbor's mule you wouldn't even get into the clubhouse at the end of it all. ~ Colin Cotterill

We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save. ~ Erich Fromm

Until you, I didn't consider my past as an issue. Yes, it affected certain ways I did things, but everything had its place and I wasn't unhappy. In fact, I thought I had a comfortable and uncomplicated life."
"Oh boy." My nose wrinkled. "Hello, Mr Comfortable. I'm Miss Complicated."
His grin flashed. "Never a dull moment. ~ Sylvia Day

Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow. ~ J.M. Barrie

The more we keep our mind on ourselves and our wants, the more unhappy we become. God wants us to love others and meet their needs. ~ Joyce Meyer

Once upon a time I thought I could change stories, make them go the way I wanted, instead of where they actually went. ~ April Genevieve Tucholke

31 against war
Weapons are unhappy tools,
not chosen by thoughtful people,
to be used only when there is no choice,
and with a calm, still mind,
without enjoyment.
To enjoy using weapons
is to enjoy killing people,
and to enjoy killing people
is to lose your share in the common good ... ~ Lao-Tzu

By the time the sixties hit their home bases, we the kids, were already born, and our parents found themselves stuck between an entrenched belief that children needed to be raised in a traditional household, and a new sense that anything was possible, that the alternative lifestyle was out there for the asking. There they were in marriages they once thought were a necessity and with children they'd had almost by accident in a world that was suddenly saying, 'No necessities! No accidents! Drop Everything!' A little too old to take full advantage of the cultural revolution, our parents just got all the fallout. Freedom hit them obliquely, and invidiously, rather than head-on. Instead of waiting longer to get married, our parents got divorced; Instead of becoming feminists, our mothers were left to become displaced homemakers. A lot of unhappy situations were dissolved by people who were not quite young or free enough to start again. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

I wanted to show I had balls at age 60. Just because society says I'm old, doesn't mean that I am. I'm pursuing happiness, even if it makes the people around me unhappy. ~ Sylvester Stallone

And when people are unhappy, they can never bring joy to anyone else. They become nothing but tenants in their own lives, with no possibility of moving anywhere bigger or more luxurious. They resign themselves to their three-rooms-and-a-kitchen under the eaves, and then escape into the pages of luxury magazines offering sensational apartments with incredible services that they will never be able to buy. They torment themselves by imagining the life they do not have. ~ Antoine Laurain

Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. ~ Simone Weil

I like Hollywood happy endings.'
'I thought you might.'
'You say it like there's something wrong with happily ever after.'
'On the contrary, if only it were true the world would be a better place.'
'Cynic.'
'Welcome to my reality.'
'That's what comes from making too much money. ~ C.C. Gibbs

A few days earlier, Chess and Thomas had driven to Spokane for a cheap hamburger. They walked in downtown Spokane and stumbled onto a drunk couple arguing.
"Get the fuck away from me!" the drunk woman yelled at her drunk husband, who squeezed his hand into a fist like he meant to hit her.
Thomas and Chess flinched, then froze, transported back to all of those drunken arguments they'd witnessed and survived.
The drunk couple in downtown Spokane pulled at each other's clothes and hearts, but they were white people. Chess and Thomas knew that white people hurt each other, too. Chess knew that white people felt pain just like Indians, Nerve endings, messages to the brain, reflexes. The doctor swung hammer against knee, and the world collapsed.
"You fucker!" the white woman yelled at her husband, who opened his hands and held them out to his wife. An offering. That hand would not strike her. He pleaded with his wife until she fell back into his arms. That white woman and man held each other while Chess and Thomas watched. A hundred strangers walked by and never noticed any of it.
After that, Chess and Thomas had sat in the van in a downtown parking lot. Thomas began to weep, deep ragged tears that rose along his rib cage, filled his mouth and nose, and exploded out. ~ Sherman Alexie

He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down.
'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here? ~ Anne Enright