Campbell follows with a quote from Ovid's Metamorposes, "All things are changing; nothing dies..."
Chapter 2
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)
Context: The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms... the two are the terms of a single mythological theme... the down-going and the up-coming (kathados and anodos), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (katharsis=purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with the mortal form).
“What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.”
As quoted in French Ways and Their Meaning http://www.archive.org/details/frenchwaysandthe00wharuoft (1919) by Edith Wharton, p. 65
Variant:
What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.
As quoted in A Backward Glance http://archive.org/details/backwardglance030620mbp (1934) by Edith Wharton, p. 147
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William Dean Howells 18
author, critic and playwright from the United States 1837–1920Related quotes
“True stories seldom have endings.
I don't want a happy ending, I want more story.”
Source: Fly by Night
“If you want a happy ending, it just depends on where you close the book!”
From the published screenplay for "The Big Brass Ring" (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Teresa Press, 1987)
Variant: If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
“The tragedy of human history is decreasing happiness in the midst of increasing comforts.”
in A Treasury Of Inspirational Thoughts http://books.google.co.in/books?id=rdHW86GkUrMC&pg=PA68, p. 58
Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago