Quotes About Fairy tales

Spontaneity, personal initiative, free choice - these ideals of Western society are fairy tales invented for people who don't want to admit they know better.

For many scientists, as Lyotard concedes, scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge there is, but if so, how then do we understand fairy stories and law?

The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales'. And even this is objectionable, since many science fiction stories take place in the present or the past, far and near.

What I mean is, all the terrible things that happen in fairy tales seem real. Or not real, but genuine. Life is unfair, and the bad guys keep winning and good people die. But I like how that's not always the end of it...Evil is real, but so is good. They always say fairy tales are simplistic, black and white, but I don't think so. I think they're complicated. That's what I love about them.

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest.

I yearned for the kind of unseasoned telling foundIn legends, fairy tales, a tone licked cleanOver the centuries by mild old tongues,Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous.

Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis, in fairy tales and sometimes in actuality.

In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness —from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables.

People have the wrong idea about fairy tales, they think they're about being rescued by handsome princes, whereas really they're like Girl Guide handbooks.

Idle man, chases after fairy tales.

Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.

Then clear on a flute of purest gold A sweet little fairy played. And wonderful fairy tales she told and marvelous music made.

Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.

The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.

I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

It is the duty of every father... to write fairy tales for his children.

They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.

A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy tales Acts like a sick god, but like a god. Because even though he affirms that what doesn't exist exists, He knows things exist, that he exists, He knows existing exists and doesn't explain itself, And he knows there's no reason at all for anything to exist. He knows being is the point. All he doesn't know is that thought isn't the point. (10/1/1917)

One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.

Evil isn't beautiful on its own. You know?' 'Well, good people are sometimes ugly-' Blanche said at last. 'I don't know about that. Not really,' Bear shook his head. 'If the good's there, and you look for it, you'll see it in some way.' 'I think Bear is right,' Rose said decidedly. 'Fairy tales teach you that. No one who's really good ever stays ugly. It's always a disguise.

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.

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.