Life Happily Quotes

“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.”

— Beatrice McClearn

“I see no reason for denying so fundamental an urge, ruin or no. It is more important to live the life one wishes to live, and to go down with it if necessary, quite contentedly, than to live more profitably but less happily. Yet to achieve content under sometimes adverse circumstances, requires first an adjustment within oneself, and this I had already made, and after that, a recognition that one is not unique in being obliged to toil and struggle and suffer. This is the simplest of all facts and the most difficult for the individual ego to accept. As I look back on those first difficult times at the Creek, when it seemed as though the actual labor was more than I could bear, and the making of a living on the grove impossible, it was old black Martha who drew aside a curtain and led me in to the company of all those who had loved the Creek and been tormented by it.”

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life”

— Michael Palin

“It would have been so easy to believe every word he said and drive off with him into the moonlight like a scene from a fairy tale. But I wasn't meant for happily ever after in my past life, and it was starting to seem like this one wouldn't be any different.”

— Michelle Madow

“God gave you life to live happily not to suffer heavily. I felt sufferment.”

— Nadair Desmar

“For the first time in his life he'd dared to believe in happily-ever-after.He learned at a young age it was unattainable. Therefore, he'd never even tried ... until Claire.”

— Aleatha Romig

“Do you know why happily ever after is a lie?" Snow asked. "Because life is change.”

— Jim C. Hines

“As a child I was a little bit disgusted and embarrassed to learn about the facts of life, and did not immediately connect the idea of "sex" to the feelings I got when I lay on the carpet on my stomach,idly humping a stuffed animal while watching Sesame Street. The realization that sex could be something to anticipate happily rather than to dread as another unpleasant grown-up duty came to me in a dream. Nothing overtly sexual even happened in this dream-it was a dream about lying in bed on a sunny afternoon with sun streaking the sheets, surrounded by warmth, feeling satisfied. It took life a long time for life to catch up with what this idealized version of sex could be like; it's still not like that every time, but when it is, I notice.”

— Emily Gould

“[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.”

— Richard Peck

“How to explain the sheer tingling joy one experiences when two interesting, complex, and occasionally aggravating characters have at last settled their misunderstandings and will live happily ever after, no matter what travails life might throw in their path, because Jane Austen said they will, and that's that? How to describe the exhilaration of being caught up in an unknown but glamorous world of balls and gowns and rides in open carriages with handsome young men? How to explain that the best part of Jane Austen's world is that sudden recognition that the characters are just like you?”

— Margaret C. Sullivan

“Henry's face went red in anger as he blustered at her audacity. It wasn't often anyone got the better of him, and Sin knew no woman had ever flummoxed him before. Not even Eleanor.
"You are willing to declare war for him ?" Henry asked indignantly.
She didn't hesitate with her response. "I am. Are you?"
Sin closed his eyes as he heard the most precious words of his life. She who believed in nothing but peace was willing to fight for him. He could die happily knowing that.
Still, he couldn't let her do this. Henry would not rest until he buried her and her clan. A king's reputation was all he had, and if Henry lost face ...
"Callie," Sin said, waiting until her gaze met his. "Thank you, but you can't do this. You can't start a war over me. I'm not worth the cost."
"You are worth everything to me.”

— Kinley MacGregor

“Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries: a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily.”

— A.E. Housman

“The ultimate act of heroism shouldn't be death. You're always saying you want to give Baz the stories he deserves ... So you're going to kill him off? Isn't the best revenge supposed to be a life well-lived? The punk-rock way to end it would be to let them live happily ever after.”

— Rainbow Rowell

“Happily ever after?"
"If justice doesn't triumph and love doesn't make the circle in entertainment fiction, what's the point? Real life sucks too often.”

— Nora Roberts

“If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people - I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images - the emotional quality - of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself - my dreaming life - still lives in the light of childhood.”

— Maurice Sendak

“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.”

— Marie Coulson

“I learned that we may meet a true love and that our lives may be transformed by such an encounter even when it does not lead to sexual pleasure, committed bonding, or even sustained contact. The myth of true love-that fairy-tale vision of two souls who meet, join, and live happily ever thereafter-is the stuff of childhood fantasy. Yet many of us, female and male, carry these fantasies into adulthood and are unable to cope with the reality of what it means to either have an intense life-altering connection that will not lead to an ongoing relationship or to be in a relationship. True love does not always lead to happily ever after, and even when it does sustaining love still takes work.”

— Bell Hooks

“Hello' said a vague and dreamy voice from behind them. Harry looked up: Luna Lovegood had drifted over from the Ravenclaw table. Many people were staring at her and few people openly laughing and pointing; she had managed to procure a hat shaped like a life-size lion's head, which was perched precariously on her head.
'I'm supporting Gryffindor' said Luna, pointing unnecessarily at her hat. Look what it does ... '
She reached up and tapped the hat with her wand. It opened its mouth wide and gave an extremely realistic roar that made everyone in the vicinity jump.
'It's good, isn't it?' said Luna happily. 'I wanted to have it chewing up a serpent to represent Slytherin, you know, but there wasn't time. Anyway ... good luck, Ronald!”

— J.K. Rowling

“Everything in life, bad or good, makes you change and grow - happily, because if it didn't, we'd be machines.”

— Emmanuelle Seigner

“There are enough reasons to live your life happily rather than sacrificing it for a lie.”

— M.F. Moonzajer

“Man's primary purpose is not to be happy but to continue to live, to continue to travel - happily or unhappily - on the path of life!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“Raven was asking Apple to give up all known paths forever after. To lose everything that was known and safe. To spend her entire life on unfamiliar paths and wind-beaten cliffs. Every day uncertain, dangerous, treading water in a well with no guarantee of a Happily Ever After.”

— Shannon Hale

“Then my mother shocked me. She said, " All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things too." [She] showed me the handful of bullets she'd had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she was happily married ... ) to my father. "You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I desired in life, honey. Remember- I come from a different time and place ... and you have to understand how much I love your father.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“I've had an absolutely charmed life in every aspect of it. I do for my job what I would do for a hobby if it wasn't my job. Half the secret of happiness, I'm ecstatically happily married with three great kids, you know. It's been a blessed life.”

— Graeme Base

“The acceptance of death gives you more of a stake in life, in living life happily, as it should be lived. Living for the moment.”

— Sting

“I know of nothing that has led me to reflect more on Plato's concealment and sphinx nature than that happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was discovered no 'Bible', nothing Egyptian, Pythagorean, Platonic - but Aristophanes. How could even a Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he had denied - without an Aristophanes! -”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Well, if I were you, I'd leave him. I'd find someone with a more normal way of looking at things and live happily ever after. There's no way in hell you can be happy with him. The way he lives, it never crosses his mind to try to make himself happy or to make others happy. Staying with him will only wreck your nervous system. To me, it's already a miracle that you've been with him three years. Of course, I'm very fond of him in my own way. He's fun, and he has lots of great qualities.
He has strengths and abilities that I could never hope to match. But in the end, his ideas about things and the way he lives his life are not normal. Sometimes, when I'm talking to him, I feel as if I'm going
around and around in circles. The same process that takes him higher and higher leaves me going around in circles. It makes me feel so empty! Finally, our very systems are totally different. Do you see what I'm saying?”

— Haruki Murakami

“I don't like heavy baggage." The driver laughed. "Who does? But before you know it, you're surrounded by it. That's life. C'est la vie." And again, he laughed happily.”

— Haruki Murakami

“My mother and father were never frightened of anything. They always felt that they should go through life happily and without fear, and they did that. And it was a great boon to my brother and myself.”

— John Cassavetes

“I just want girls to realize, everybody's born a way for a reason, and you are who you are. You should just be yourself at all times. The only way you're going to get through life, happily, is being yourself.”

— Nikki Blonsky

“Life isn't easy. Love isn't easy. Fairy tales are books we read to children. Romance novels are books that make teenagers dream of love and happily ever afters. I'm here to tell you my story. This is my diary. This is my life. This is my truth. You can't make this shit up.”

— Brenda Novak

“... she was one of those happily created beings who please without effort, make friends everywhere, and take life so gracefully and easily that less fortunate souls are tempted to believe that such are born under a lucky star.”

— Louisa May Alcott

“I can't live my life happily knowing you're with someone else. That would kill a part of me. What we have is rare. it's too beautiful to just throw it away.”

— Nicholas. Sparks

“Throughout my life, I happily deferred to family, companions, children.”

— Patti Smith

“You happily give Facebook terabytes of structured data about yourself, content with the implicit tradeoff that Facebook is going to give you a social service that makes your life better.”

— John Battelle

“The idea was flawed, of course," he said irritably. "Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living.”

— Tana French

“If this were a book written to entertain small children, you would know what would happen next. With the villain's identity and evil plans exposed, the police would arrive on the scene and place him in a jail for the rest of his life, and the plucky youngsters would go out for pizza and live happily ever after. But this book is about the Baudelaire orphans, and you and I know that these three unfortunate children living happily ever after is about as likely as Uncle Monty returning to life.”

— Lemony Snicket

“The relationship between a manufacturer and his advertising agency is almost as intimate as the relationship between a patient and his doctor. Make sure that you can life happily with your prospective client before you accept his account.”

— David Ogilvy

“I always assumed I'd spend my life happily performing in artsy-fartsy little theaters.”

— Teller

“I've had a splendid time," she concluded happily, "and I feel that it marks an epoch in my life. But the best of it all was the coming home.”

— L.M. Montgomery

“There are two basic defenses for an open ending: one is, If you read carefully enough, you'll know what happened. And the other is, That's how life is: things don't come to neat endings, there isn't a "happily ever after." But if you take that second line of defense, then I think you have to make the point that the writer has shown the range of possibility.”

— Lorin Stein

“It is not possible to live happily if one does not lead a beautiful, righteous, and wise life, or to lead a beautiful, righteous, and wise life if one is not happy. EPICURUS”

— Matthieu Ricard

“Before you sweat the logistics of focus: first, care. Care intensely ... Obsessing over the slipperiness of focus, bemoaning the volume of those devil "distractions," and constantly reassessing which shiny new "system" might make your life suddenly seem more sensible - these are all terrifically useful warning fi‚ares that you may be suffering from a deeper, more fundamental problem ... Know in your heart that what you're making or doing matters ... First, care. Then, as you'll happily and unavoidably discover, all that "focus" business has a peculiar way of taking care of itself.”

— Merlin Mann

“The tale of the Monkey Girl gave me wat I needed most at a critical time in my life: the image of the creative and complex woman, unique to herself but willing to share those considerable gifts with a man capable of intuiting the wealth of her worth hidden beneath the skin. But more than that, the Monkey Girl also suggested that I need not be afraid of the fragile happily-ever-after, that I had resources of my own, and that I would not have to contort myself into a restrictive social role for fear of losing that fairytale ending.”

— Midori Snyder

“I have spent most of my life most happily making plans for others to carry out.”

— William Beveridge

“But in real life, happily-ever-after is just the beginning. It's where life starts.”

— Kay Hooper

“Go through the things that life gives you to go through, happily. You have to loosen the grip of time, gradually.”

— Frederick Lenz

“There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no 'Bible,' nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic - but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he repudiated - without an Aristophanes!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events.”

— Winston Churchill

“Never sacrifice happiness for the sake of achievement. The real key to life is to happily achieve”

— Robin Sharma