Quotes About Fairy tales

Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of great importance. Theology induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

I'm afraid that all my life I shall be an unpolitical = asocial painter, a so-called individualist depicting lemons, writing fairy tales, collecting weird objects as a hobby and detesting associations and societies. It seems rather silly, but that's the way I want my life. And if I fight, it's only so as to find peace,' she wrote in February 1949.

I was a youngish man entering fatherhood when we wrote 'Woods,' a patchwork of classic fairy tales with an original tale sewn in. I had dedicated my libretto to my baby daughter.

I love fairy tales because of their haunting beauty and magical strangeness. They are set in worlds where anything can happen. Frogs can be kings, a thicket of brambles can hide a castle where a royal court has lain asleep for a hundred years, a boy can outwit a giant, and a girl can break a curse with nothing but her courage and steadfastness.

In the old fairy tales, often a 'moral' was tacked on at the end of the story - say, if a book was going to be marketed to young readers. And the morals don't really suit the stories at all, which makes them super weird - part of why I love the tradition so much. I do play with this, though I am more concerned with ethics than morals.

I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.

There are recurring elements in popularized fairy tales, such as absent parents, some sort of struggle, a transformation, and a marriage. If you look at a range of stories, you find many stories about marriage, sexual initiation, abandonment. The plots often revolve around what to me seem to be elemental fears and desires.

As I read more and more fairy tales as an adult, I found massive collusion between their 'subjects' and those in my fiction: childhood, nature, sexuality, transformation. I realized that it wasn't by accident that I was drawn to their narrative structure and motifs.

Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.

I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I've always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized "realistic" story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its "realist" style.

It's all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.

I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them

Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.

When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he'd made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, 'Well, they've all been done before. There are so many blooming books in the world - why should I write another one?'

In another chapter I have told you how in the year 800 a German chieftain had become a Roman Emperor. Now in the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse pirate was recognised as King of England. Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so much more interesting and entertaining?

Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.

UFCNo such thing as childhood memories, he says. We're just playing games with our neurons every day, tossing them around the hippocampus, constructing little fairy tales featuring characters named after people we used to live with. 'Your dad is just a flurry of molecular activity in your frontal lobe' he'll tell you...

No such thing as childhood memories, he says. We're just playing games with our neurons every day, tossing them around the hippocampus, constructing little fairy tales featuring characters named after people we used to live with. 'Your dad is just a flurry of molecular activity in your frontal lobe' he'll tell you...

Trousers don't suit cats, messire,' replied the cat with great dignity. 'Why don't you tell me to wear boots? Cats always wear boots in fairy tales. But have you ever seen a cat going to a ball without a tie? I don't want to make myself look ridiculous.

Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams.

At the end of the day, love is such a normal thing, and everyone deals with it. Just because it's a different lifestyle doesn't change the meaning of what I've been raised on, which is fairy tales.

Life isn't easy. Love isn't easy. Fairy tales are books we read to children. Romance novels are books that make teenagers dream of love and happily ever afters. I'm here to tell you my story. This is my diary. This is my life. This is my truth. You can't make this shit up.

Fairy tales have their origins in reality, Auris. In this world, if not in the one you think you came from. Nothing comes from a void; all things have some connection to truth.

Just a minute, said Lobsang. Who are you? Time has stopped, the world is given over to...fairy tales and monsters, and there's a schoolteacher walking around? Best kind of person to have, said Susan. We don't like silliness. Anyway, I told you. I've inherited certain talents. Like living outside of time? That's one of them. It's a weird talent for a schoolteacher! Good for marking, though, said Susan calmly.