“How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn’t it?”

“I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work.”

“He was reading from the beginning so that he could get to the end, where the reader was assured that the knight and the fair maiden lived together happily ever after.”

“There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness.”

“People in the real world would kill for a happily ever after, and you're willing to just throw it away?"
I look away from her. "It's hardly a happily ever after when you wind up right at the beginning.”

“What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, 'They lived happily ever after,' and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year.”

“But answer me this: how can a story end happily if there is no love?”

“True love is taking the risk that it won't be a happily-ever-after. True love is joining hands with the man who loves you for who you are, and saying, "I'm not afraid to believe in you.”

“When two people were in love you had to leave them to it. Especially when you weren't in love and wished that you were. That could embarrass. That could hurt.”

“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.”