Gilly was crying now. She couldn’t help herself. “Trotter, it’s all wrong. Nothing turned out the way it’s supposed to.”
“How you mean supposed to? Life ain’t supposed to be nothing, ‘cept maybe tough.”
“But I always thought that when my mother came...”
“My sweet baby, ain’t no one ever told you yet? I reckon I thought you had all that figured out...All that stuff about happy endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death. Now that might or might not be happy, but either way, you ain’t ready to die, are you?...Sometimes in this world things come easy, and you tend to lean back and say, ‘Well, finally, happy ending. This is the way things is supposed to be.’ Like life owed you good things...And there is lots of good things, baby, Like you coming to be with us here this fall. That was a mighty good thing for me and William Ernest. But you just fool yourself if you expect good things all the time. They ain’t what’s regular—don’t nobody owe ‘em to you.”
“If life is so bad, how come you’re so happy?”
“Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?”
-Katherine Paterson, The Great Gilly Hopkins, 147-148.
1 comment:
I read Bridge to Terabithia in the summer of 1988, right after I finished fourth grade. That was the first book I ever read with a sad ending, and it was such a shock to my 10-year-old sense of order, that it's taken me 20 years to pick up another book by Katherine Paterson. How fitting, then, that this book ends with a thoughtful discussion of happy endings!
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