Quotes from Kate Bernheimer

I often visit Maria Tatar's 'The Grimm Reader' for a cold dose of courage. Her translations come from the Brothers Grimm, whose now-famous collection of 'Kinder- und Hausmarchen' ('Children's and Household Tales') was first published in 1812. The book was not intended for young readers.

I think pink is one of the saddest colors in the world, and many American humans are taught not to take anything pink seriously, which is weird.

As scientists have discovered - or perhaps explained is a better word, or perhaps identified - we now live in the age of the Anthropocene. The geologic age of the Anthropocene. Those high priests of material evidence have given us our own epoch like the Holocene, the Pleistocene! Apparently we now, it seems, have superhuman powers.

Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.

Beer bottles, whiskey bottles, brown glass, green. They fell to the lawn and I'd feel serene. Adam was king to my stilted queen.

All good animals have secret lives.

Doll-less, invisible friend-less, finally more comfortable in fear than in gladness, Astrid began to live in her head. Or rather inside a small tunnel - a hole - in her head, through which she watched everything gaily depart. She nodded this head and pretended to listen. 'Bye-bye,' she would hear from within.

I have been transcribing those poems and considering how lucky we are to live longer than flowers, even if not much happens to us.

The home in which you reside it not forever.

No longer could I root happily into my mother's company and find comfort in her rounded shape. There was no one to tell me the facts. How much nutrition to pull from the dirt? Would the beetles bring harm? And what of the worms? Friends, foe, or nevermind?

I know that human triumph is never fully redemptive.

Thankfully, the farmers understand my request that the children not be allowed to peer through the windows at me. It would be alarming for them to see me with their dolls, to see me using the knife on their faces. There are some things children never should see.

What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine. —from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 Rainer Maria Rilke

Plain and simple, I hope, in a fairy tale way: in fairy tales it is often the humble to whom magic is revealed.

As a kid, being with her was easy; it was the nearest to heaven I've ever been.

The father washes his hands of his son, so the boy is forced to set out alone to try and find fear, hoping that by doing so he'll fit in, that finally he'll belong. That maybe once he can shudder, he'll be able to go home. That's a line that always got me, that part about the shudder and going home.

Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps. Reading them often provides an uneasy sensation—a gnawing familiarity—that comforting yet supernatural awareness of living inside a story.

Because he gets scared, he becomes human. Because, my grandmother said, love makes you human. And the loss of love is pain, is fear, is sadness. The boy's wife had hurt him. Before he had nothing to lose, and now, of course, he did.

Not comforting to see pain and death but just to see what she could not let herself imagine and therefore ruled her.

Ogres bumbled, and erred, but their weaknesses were not hidden and this helped them, in the long run.

It was in this way that my idea of brothers began-that brothers were sweet and needed much saving.

I know many writers who say that the memory of reading fairy tales is their first, and sometimes only, memory of rapture. I hope that this unpredictable, intense collection inspires you to read fairy tales-and then to read them again.

It was as if every other joy in the world existed only to give a distant glimpse of that one.

All good fairy tales have meaning to many levels, Bruno Bettleheim observes in The Uses of Enchantment. Only the child can know which meanings are significance to him at the moment.