Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.

Happy endings usually don't work for me. I like open endings. I trust the reader’s imagination.

A happy ending was imperative

Thus King Dolor's reign passed, year after year, long and prosperous. Whether he was happy — "as happy as a king" — is a question no human being can decide. But I think he was, because he had the power of making everybody about him happy, and did it too; also because he was his godmother's godson, and could shut himself up with her whenever he liked, in that quiet little room in view of the Beautiful Mountains, which nobody else ever saw or cared to see. They were too far off, and the city lay so low. But there they were, all the time. No change ever came to them; and I think, at any day throughout his long reign, the King would sooner have lost his crown than have lost sight of the Beautiful Mountains.

Happy endings were for children’s stories and fool. You live in misery, and then you die. Life, by definition, was not designed to end happily.
Louis continued aft. No happy ending, then. That was a fact, certain as death itself. He was living at the moment in a dream, an imagined world where everything went right.
But—dreams are real while they last. Could you say more of life?
A dream sequence was no more than a happy interlude, but maybe a happy interlude could last for an awful long time.

This pagan geocentrism has changed the very content of our culture. The "happy end" of the cheap, popular novels and the films is nothing but the outcome of the supposition that the human drama finds its ultimate conclusion here on earth. The Calvinists in their materialism took a similar attitude. The more subtle Atheist, of greater experience, has contempt for the "happy end" and substitutes for it a stubborn heroical pessimism which comes pretty near to integral despair. The modern Catholic French writers like Mauriac and Bernanos avoid the happy end in relation to this life. Paul Claudel, in L'Ôtage, expresses his disbelief in earthly justice by punishing the people of good will and rewarding the villains in the last scene of this play. For the Christian the earth is essentially a "vale of tears."

The veteran king sat down on the cliff-top.
He wished good luck to the Geats who had shared
his hearth and his gold. He was sad at heart,
unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.
His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain:
it would soon claim his coffered soul,
part life from limb

[A happy ending is] a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks.

The ancients had a taste, let us say rather a passion, for the marvellous, which caused them to forget even the sacred duties of gratitude. Observe them, for example, grouping together the lofty deeds of a great number of heroes, whose names they have not even deigned to preserve, and investing the single personage of Hercules with them. The lapse of ages has not rendered us wiser in this respect. In our own time the public delight in blending fable with history. In every career of life, in the pursuit of science especially, they enjoy a pleasure in creating Herculeses.

There are no happy endings... There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories - perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years - and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.

Such death makes happier end
than conquests of huge realms or infinite gold.

The phrases, "happy ending" and "unhappy ending" are misnomers. They belong to an era when the public demanded a saccharine finish to every picture, irrespective of whether or not it was logical. Film-goers of 1933 insist upon a new standard in their screen entertainment. They are not particularly concerned about the ending of a picture so long as it is truthful. Naturally, they do not want a preponderance of depressing themes, but I am firmly convinced that they would rather witness a tragic finish that is truthful and logical than a sugar-coated ending that is not. In The Sign of the Cross the problem of bringing the story to a close is one that would have been difficult a few years ago, when the sugary tradition ruled the film industry. But now that the words "happy" and "unhappy" have been deleted from cinema terminology, our task was simplified, and we gave an ending which appeals to logic and intelligence.

How do you get the happy ending? John Irving ought to know. One of my favorite authors, Irving writes these multigenerational epics of fiction that somehow work out in the end. How does he do it? He says, 'I always begin with the last sentence ; then I work my way backwards, through the plot, to where the story should begin.' That sounds like a lot of work, especially compared to the fantasy that great writers sit down and just go where the story takes them. Irving lets us know that good stories and happy endings are more intentional than that.

Most 20 something's can't write the last sentence of their lives. But when pressed, they usually can identify things they want in their 30s or 40s or 60s -or things they don't want- and work backward from there. This is how you have your own multigenerational epic with a happy ending. This is how you live your life in real time.

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!