Quotes from Marina Warner

It's a long time ago that I lost my faith in Mary, a long time since she was the fulcrum of the scheme of salvation I then believed in, alongside Jesus the chief redeemer. But I find that the symbolism of mercy and love which her figure has traditionally expressed has migrated and now shapes secular imagery and events; Catholic worship and moral teaching no longer monopolize it or control its significance.

in 1068, it would have already been impossible for Hansel and Gretel to walk more than four miles through any English wood without bursting back out into open fields. The landscape of fairy tales is symbolic: The forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered.

In The Invention of Literature (1999), the classical scholar Florence Dupont reminds us that many of the greatest works of human imagination were created to be performed, to be heard. Before the printing press and mass literacy, the written versions existed as blueprints or records of performances, recitals, speeches, songs, and other forms of oral communication. Voicing was an art of living creators, and the voice of the storyteller was

a world in a grain of sand | And a heaven in a wild flower'.

Above all, love must be freely given, by mutual consent on both sides, through the exercise of free will. Because it is thus freely chosen, it is an act of humanity and civilisation, neither a daemonic possession such as hurled Dido upon her funeral pyre or Medea upon her children, not the base stirrings of concupiscence.

This government has represented benefits as somehow shameful. The point about universal benefits is that they affirm the value of such social tasks as having children, rearing them, or caring for relatives; they make benefits themselves an expression of collective approval for the endeavour, not begrudged hand-outs, stigmatising the recipients as beggars and failures.

Comparisons with the past are of limited help: The ending of hanging won't make suicides in youth remand centres go away; the mortality, famine, rickets, scabies of Victorian slum children don't turn free school milk into a excessive luxury.

Children inherent principles; they do not set them.

Inequality is catching.

I love titles and organizing chains of ideas. I like that very much.

I avoid looking in the mirror.

Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

I shop online because I don't like to try things on in front of an alien mirror.

One of the achievements of our generation of feminists was to emancipate women from the division between being interested in clothes and appearance, and being serious and ambitious. I am of the first generation that could go to Biba, wear miniskirts and get a degree.

Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.

When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.

We all share the right to create our own savage, as Glifford Geertz has remarked [ Out of the Garden ].

As the queen [Sheba] makes her approach toward Jerusalem, she comes to a footbridge across the stream of Kidron, flowing below the mount where Solomon built his temple; this footbridge is made of wood destined to become the cross on which the Savior will be crucified [ Out of the Garden ].

Britain was the last developed country where beating schoolchildren was respectable. This was outlawed last year [1988] - by one vote in Parliament. Parents are now almost the last people left who can hit children without fear of penalty, as long as it's moderate and fitting punishment...the language of authority still derives from violence, mistakenly, tragically.

We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits …

For some, the unborn child is sacred to a degree the teenager never attains.