Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?

The line turns a metaphysical concept into a comic paradox: eternity is frightening not because it ends, but because it doesn’t. By asking “where’s it going to end?”, the speaker exposes how human thinking relies on boundaries, conclusions, and narrative closure. Stoppard often uses wit to probe philosophical unease—here, humor becomes a way to register genuine anxiety about infinity, death, and meaning. The joke also suggests that even our language for the infinite is built from finite expectations, so the mind responds to “eternity” with the same demand it makes of stories and lives: an ending.