Quotes About Fairy tales

'Once Upon a Time', 'Mirror Mirror' - those shows and films focus on women and their conflict with one another. What the heck is going on in contemporary fairy tales? Women are not dominating the world; they are not evil.

With 'Stardust', I hope what I was doing is giving 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 60-year-olds a chance to get the same sense of wonder, the same feeling, the same magic, that they got in reading the classic fairy tales as children.

In music, on stage and on screen, fairy tales have always been guaranteed moneymakers. It's no wonder then, that in these difficult economic times, there are fairy tales everywhere you turn. From 'Once Upon a Time' and 'Grimm,' to 'Mirror, Mirror' and 'Snow White and the Huntsman.'

All fairy tales, Tolkien argued, echo the gospel of Jesus Christ in some way because the gospel is the True Story; it's the real fairy tale that crashed into the time line of history... 'The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact,' Lewis wrote

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.

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.

The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.

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.

Mary Jane Clairmont, the second wife of William Godwin, and Mary Shelley's stepmother, had the idea of bringing out French fairy tales for children in an attempt to make some much needed money for the family (she has not been given her due by biographers, in my view).

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.

Reading ancient myths and fairy tales can be very helpful because these stories came spontaneously from people who had not studied psychology. The stories came straight out of their unconscious and, therefore, show us how the unconscious works unimpeded by conscious intervention. The images are clear and stark. For those of us who are interested in why we do what we do when we want to do the opposite, the stories are gold mines of information.

It is adorable and healthily childlike secretly to believe in fairy tales, but the instant one articulates such viewpoints to other people, one goes from darling to dumbo, from childlike to chillingly out of touch with reality.

Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi's Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium.

fortuitous for me. This sort of tale serves, in many ways, the very same purpose as fairy tales did in our childhood: It operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out. In these tales we can parade the most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide. It allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety.

J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us that to leave fantasy in the nursery, or to believe that there is some particular connection between fairy tales and children, is to forget that children are not a separate race, a separate kind of creature from the human family at large.

Kelly Link is the author of three collections: Magic for Beginners, Stranger Things Happen, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have appeared in A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales; Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things; Firebirds Rising; The Starry Rift; The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales; and The Restless Dead.

Happiness, you see, its just an illusion of Fate, a heavenly sleight of hand designed to make you believe in fairy tales. But there's no happily ever after. You'll only find happy endings in books. Some books.

This is overdue. Quite a bit, I'm afraid. I apologize. We moved to Topeka when I was very small, and Mother accidentally packed it up with the linens. I have traveled a long way to return it, and I know the fine must be large, but I have no money. As it is a book of fairy tales, I thought payment of a first-born child would be acceptable. I always loved the library. I'm sure she'll be happy there.

Beautiful girls in fairy stories are as common as pebbles on the beach. Magnolia-skinned milkmaids rub shoulders with starry-eyed princesses and, in fact, counting two eyes in each bright-eyed damsel would result in a whole galaxy of twinkling stars.

The savings of workers are fairy tales invented by bourgeois economists to lull their weak sentiment of justice.

Everyone is afraid. We help young children overcome their fears with fairy tales, and then as soon as they get to school they are scared of showing their parents a school report with bad marks in it. Fear of water. Fear of fire. Fear of animals, fear of the dark. Fear, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, of making wrong choices and ruining your life.

Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of 'fairy' is imported as a delicate spice.

The narrative of so many fairy tales are timeless in so many different cultures, and they have been since the dawn of man. They represent escapism, but they all feature themes that have such poignancy in a modern world.