Quotes about fairy-tales

Dejan Stojanovic - The Sun Watches the Sun

The world is a fairy tale we are its guardians.

Angela Carter - The Company of Wolves

The girl burst out laughing she knew she was nobody's meat.

G.K. Chesterton - All Things Considered

We are in this fairyland on sufferance it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world.

Kate Morton - The Forgotten Garden

Mother didn't understand that children aren't frightened by stories that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales.

Rob E. Boley - That Risen Snow: Snow White & Zombies

Snow came back, but she didn't come back right.

John Connolly - The Book of Lost Things

My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man's.

Rob E. Boley - That Wicked Apple: Snow White & Even More Zombies

Magic is a naughty beast.

John C. Wright - Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

You see, none of these conflicts are about things that people only sort of like. It is always about love. You may think me blasphemous to use the Passion of the Christ as an example of drama, but not so: this is the one true story, the greatest story ever told, the tale of tales even as Christ is the King of Kings, and all truly inspired fairy tales and fiction have to contain some echo or reflection of the One True Tale, or else it is no tale of any power at all, merely a pastime.The most power

Bruce McQueen - The Pearl and the Golden Plinth: Magic and Sorcery clash together in this epic tale of legends.

Imagine a perfect world

Ashim Shanker - Only the Deplorable

Princess Cookie’s cognitive pathways may have required a more comprehensive analysis. He knew that it was possible to employ certain progressive methods of neural interface, but he felt somewhat apprehensive about implementing them, for fear of the risks involved and of the limited returns such tactics might yield. For instance, it would be a particularly wasteful endeavor if, for the sake of exhausting every last option available, he were even to go so far as resorting to invasive Ontological N

Zoe Cruz - Beastia

Who am I kidding? This isn’t a fairy tale. It’s my life.

Marissa Meyer - Heartless

Are you here for a reason, Cheshire?Why, yes, I would enjoy a cup of tea. I take mine with lots of cream, and no tea. Thank you.

Anna Sheehan - Long Sleep

I haven't finished revisiting Sleeping Beauty. As a faerie tale, that one is rife with inherent difficulties. After all, the world doesn't stop just because one person is asleep.

Sarah Pinborough - Beauty

Sometimes,' Beauty said softly, sipping from her silver goblet, 'everyone needs to let the beast inside them out for a while'. She laughed, a sound like a waterfall meeting the sea and more glitter escaped from her fingertips. 'I like to see it. We all have our dark lusts. We should enjoy them.

Anne Sexton - Transformations

Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

Fredrik Backman - My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

We thought she'd save him. We all hoped so much that she'd save him because it would have been like a fairy tale and when one had lived in the dark for so long it's very difficult not to believe in fairy tales.

Sarah Cross - Kill Me Softly

Birthdays were wretched, delicious things when you lived in Beau Rivage. The clock stuck midnight, and presents gave way to magic.Curses bloomed.Girls bit into sharp apples instead of birthday cake, chocked on the ruby-and-white slivers, and collapsed into enchanted sleep. Unconscious beneath cobweb canopies, frozen in coffins of glass, they waited for their princes to come. Or they tricked ogres, traded their voices for love, danced until their glass slippers cracked.A prince would awaken, rous

Angela Parkhurst - The Forgotten Fairytales

Think of the cafeteria as a road map to where you belong.” Danielle pointed to the beautiful people in one corner. “Princesses and Princes over here. Then you have Heroes—leading ladies and gents that aren’t royalty—Sidekicks, Villains, Pirates, Faeries, Future Animal Friends, and the ones scattered are extras—not too important but important enough to be here. Like I said, everyone sticks to their own kind.”“Who are you?” “Cinderella of course,” Danielle giggled.

Jacqueline Sweet - A Slice of Honeybear Pie

In fairy tales,” her mother used to say, “no one ever says I love you. They give food and they kiss. That’s what love is made of.

Shannon L. Alder -

Your love life is insignificant when it comes to raising your children to be respectable human beings. The moment you see them suffer or lower their standards because of your selfishness, is the day you should realize that nothing matters more than them. You are not just the queen or king of your fairy tale. The real story of your life is the gift of time God gave you with them.

Melody Carstairs -

A make believe life doesn't win friends and influence people. It bores the crap out of those living the dream.

Jeanne Desy - The Princess Who Stood on Her Own Two Feet

A long time ago in a kingdom by the sea there lived a princess as tall and bright as a sunflower.

Mercedes M. Yardley - Beautiful Sorrows

Do you mind,” he asked politely, “if I slide my blade under your skin, just a little?

G.K. Chesterton -

The supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born ... by the act of being born, we step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words ... we step into a fairy-tale.

Neil Gaiman - Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

She's as old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death.

Jacob Grimm - The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm - Illustrated by Arthur Rackham

Evil is also not anything small or close to home, and not the worst; otherwise one could grow accustomed to it.

Mehmet Murat ildan -

Fairy-tales exist and the best proof for this is our own childhood! Yes, childhood is a real fairy tale!

Priya Ardis - My Boyfriend Merlin

Did you recently turn into a jerk or have you been one since birth?

Priya Ardis - My Boyfriend Merlin

Do I look like I want to be involved in your teen love saga? Ask someone who cares.

Priya Ardis - My Boyfriend Merlin

He’s so powerful. Who knows maybe he’s advanced past eating

Priya Ardis - My Boyfriend Merlin

My name is Arianna Morganna Brittany DuLac--you can imagine why I went by the name Ryan.

Priya Ardis - My Boyfriend Merlin

Soft sun shone down on a misty cathedral at the opposite end of a football-field length courtyard. The cathedral had a long pointed tower with beautiful rose and ivory stained glass windows. Pink-petal flowers and deep green ivy climbed the stones from the ground to it’s roof. A large fountain stood in the middle of the courtyard with water falling from several lion’s heads. Between the misty air and rolling slope of the earth, the grounds reminded me of a long lost fairy tale.

Priya Ardis -

Marilynn...passed out black cases to everyone. I opened mine to find an iPad inside. Several candidates whistled. Despite my agitated state, it impressed me too. Maybe wizard school wasn’t going to be as lame as I had thought.“All of your schedules and assignments will be done on these,” Marilynn explained. “The whole school is on these. We’ve had them for awhile now.

Claire Wong - The Runaway

She is a figure of legend and fairy tale, one to be taken seriously, or she might knock you off your feet with a quick whirl of the staff she carries everywhere.

Claire Wong - The Runaway

I have always loved fairy tales, even now at the age when I am supposed to be too grown up and cynical for them.

Emma Trevayne - Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times

The landscape always changed, but the magic never did. The tales were told to children wrapped up in sheets, to frighten or to soothe, but those doing the telling didn't have to believe. Perhaps it was just as well that they didn't, for the stories got so much of it wrong. They always do. The legends told of dragons and faeries, of locked towers and imprisoned princesses, and this was true enough.

Neil Gaiman - Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.)

Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.

Jane Yolen - White Raven

Ah—now you think I have been lying to you, that this is only a story. It has a king in it. And while a story with Death might be true, a story with a king in it is always a fairy tale. But remember, this comes from a time when kings were as common as corn. Plant a field and you got corn. Plant a kingdom and you got a king. It is that simple.

Christine Heppermann - My Pretty

But here's a great thing about stories: they can be retold.

Philip Pullman - Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version

Finally, I’d say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don’t be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I’m at work I’m highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach

Gratis P. Spencer -

Science has never killed or persecuted a single person for doubting or denying its teaching, and most of these teaching have been true; but religion has murdered millions for doubting or denying her dogmas and most of these dogmas have been false.All stories about gods and devils, of heavens and hells, as they do not conform to nature, and are not apparent to sense, should be rejected without consideration. Beyond the universe there is nothing and within the universe the supernatural does not an

George R.R. Martin - A Clash of Kings

I believe in steel swords, gold coins, and man's wits. (...) And I believe there once were dragons. I've seen their skulls, after all.

Nur Bedeir -

«And in the end» said the witch to the drowning prince «You've been the one choosing the thornless path in spite of knowing where it could lead. The one who afraid of the pricking roses, plunged himself into an abyss without petals

Anthon St. Maarten -

These days when you kiss a prince you often run the risk of turning him into a frog. But don't let the ogres in shining armor get you down. There is no need for distress - you don't want to be anyone's damsel anyway. Simply remind yourself that you are busy racking up those 'frequent failure points' that will eventually pay for an all expenses paid trip to Mr Right.

Camilla Isley - I Wish for You

...your heart spoke for you. You gave up everything for me.

Miriam Joy - Broken Body Fragile Heart

But nobody writes fairy talesabout the ugly and poemsare not there for the brokenand I will never find myselfin the words of a hymnnor will any whispered prayerever say my name(which name, which meam I looking for?)because I am shoutingat a cross splintered into piecesby my angry fists, and cryingat the stained glass fallinglike killing rain around me.

Chris DiSano Davenport - See the Little People...An Enchanting Adventure

Grampa says the grass is not greener on the other side. All grass changes with the seasons, it grows, it browns, and it can die if you do not nurture it. You must accept the changes, yet the grass is as green as you make it right here and now! Going from one meadow to another does not change the season! Or the meadow!"Deetkatu, Meet the Little People…An Enchanting Adventure

Lailah Gifty Akita - Think Great: Be Great!

All experiences are stories to be told and must be written.

Peach-Pit - Vol. 2: Friends in Need

I'll tell you a secret about storytelling. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty... were not perfect in the beginning. It's only a happy ending on the last page, right? If the princess had everything from the beginning, there wouldn't be a story. Anyone who is imperfect or incomplete can become the main character in the story.

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew - and Holiness

When you enter the woods of a fairy tale and it is night, the trees tower on either side of the path. They loom large because everything in the world of fairy tales is blown out of proportion. If the owl shouts, the otherwise deathly silence magnifies its call. The tasks you are given to do (by the witch, by the stepmother, by the wise old woman) are insurmountable - pull a single hair from the crescent moon bear's throat; separate a bowl's worth of poppy seeds from a pile of dirt. The forest se

Shannon Noelle Long - Second Coming

Once upon a time there was a man with no heart. Drifting through black-and-white life, caring naught for those hurt, and never, ever allowing another near enough to hurt him. Until, on the least likely day, the most unlikely place, the man with no heart met the most surprising person. He was fearless. He was strength and power. He wore his heart boldly on his sleeve. The man with no heart began, shockingly, to feel a movement in his breast. A stretching, a slow, steady beat...

Laurie Frankel - This is How It Always Is

He had a harder time helping her out though. He was asleep while she was doing stars. Without wings, he couldn't reach anyways. In the end though what he could give her was better than magic wands and magic frogs and magic lamps. Better and more magical. What he gave her was moral support and unconditional love. He promised to be there for her always, even times when the sky proved too vast and the night was dark because she couldn't kindle all the stars. He would light her way instead, he promi

Laurie Frankel - This is How It Always Is

He had a harder time helping her out though. He was asleep while she was doing stars. Without wings, he couldn't reach anyways. In the end though what he could give her was better than magic wands and magic frogs and magic lamps. Better and more magical. What he gave her was moral support and unconditional love. He promised to be there for her always, even times when the sky proved too vast and the night was dark because she couldn't kindle all the stars. He would light her way instead, he promi

Jack D. Zipes - The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre

Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must invent or find the means through communication to satisfy as well as resolve conflicting desires and instincts.

Eraldo Banovac -

A fairy-tale life exists only in fairy tales.

Terry Moore -

Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn't it?

Adam Gidwitz - The Grimm Conclusion

Being the reader of a dark fairy tale is much like being the hero of one. Our lives are filled with pain, boredom, and fear. We want to venture into the dark wood, to see the oddities and the beauties it holds, and to test ourselves against them. So we pick up a book of fairy tales. The real ones. THe weird ones. The dark ones. We see oddities and beauties galore. We test our courage and our understanding. Finally, we put the book down and return to our lives. And hopefully, just like the hero o

Rebecca Solnit - The Faraway Nearby

Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own.Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youn

Bethany Averie - All's Fair In Love & Lion

He’s jealous because lions are better hunters.”--Monroe “Are you compensating for something, Monroe?” --Bastian

Grace Hudson - Open Doors

You think us fairies don’t understand sarcasm? We invented sarcasm.

Bethany Averie - All's Fair In Love & Lion

Are you the same woman I brought here, Sasha? You're like a kid at Christmastime."--Monroe"You would be, too, if someone fulfilled your most secret fantasies."--Sasha

Kelly Moran - Give Up the Ghost

At least that left hope for him. Except "Beauty and the Geek" wasn’t exactly the proper translation of the popular fairy tale.

Shannon Hale - The Unfairest of Them All

Don't let the inconsequential fairy tales stand in your way! You do what makes you happy, no matter what.

Dave Champion -

Americans live not by facts, but by a lengthy list of myths.

Tali Alexander - Lost in Rewind

The euphoric lust cloud is gone and once the smoke begins to clear, like in all good fairytales, the princess turns into nothing more than a common farm girl while the prince goes back to being a regular frog.

A. Lynn - Itsy's Ugly

Carelessness was once something to be owned. They wore it around their necks as they joined the springtime breeze while ducking in and out of the forest believing their fairy tale.

Mya Waechtler -

Hey, be patient you'll have to kiss a few frogs before you find one that's your prince

Elizabeth Leiknes - The Understory

There once was a woman named Story Easton who couldn't decide if she should kill herself, or eat a double cheeseburger.

Sophie Avett - #1)

Mrs. Pott's beady black eyes narrowed,"Do you know how many glass slippers I have to stitch when I get home? There's a Mad Hatter serenading a toaster as we speak. There could be mayhem wreaking havoc all over the love in New Gotham, granted what thankless ingrates you are. But here I am! I've taken a chance on you..

Sophie Avett - #1)

Mrs. Potts beady black eyes narrowed,"Do you know how many glass slippers I have to stitch when I get home? There's a Mad Hatter serenading a toaster as we speak. There could be mayhem wreaking havoc all over the love in New Gotham, granted what thankless ingrates you are. But here I am!

Sophie Avett - #1)

That's it? That's all that happens after you topple from grace? We lose our rubies and rations?" Marshall smirked. "Woe is me.

Holly Black - White Cat

It’s just that you go so crazy being alone like that. Sometimes he’d forget my water or food and I’d cry and cry and cry.” She stops talking and looks out the window. “I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up.

Kate Forsyth - The Puzzle Ring

There's a flame of magic inside every stone & every flower, every bird that sings & every frog that croaks. There's magic in the trees & the hills & the river & the rocks, in the sea & the stars & the wind, a deep, wild magic that's as old as the world itself. It's in you too, my darling girl, and in me, and in every living creature, be it ever so small. Even the dirt I'm sweeping up now is stardust. In fact, all of us are made from the stuff of stars.

David Attenborough -

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh - North to the Orient

Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.

J.E.B. Spredemann - Rosabelle's Story

Yep, there's special eyes that only Jesus can give. When people have special eyes, they can see past a person's face and show other people love.

Angela Parkhurst - The Forgotten Fairytales

That's the tragedy of fairy tales. The whole world puts them on a pedestal. People want their lives to be magical, but what people don't understand is that happiness is sacrificed. There is so much more to the story than what is written. The Cinderella you think she's so unfortunate with her mean sisters and stepmom. You think she deserves a happy ending with a prince, but the twenty-page journey is all you see. You learn little about who she is. What if Cinderella's just a good actress who has

Angela Parkhurst - Forget Me Not

Fairytales have rules. We may never understand them but they've been hammered into our heads since infancy. Eventually, even the rebels conform.

Molly Ringle - The Goblins of Bellwater

Everyone knew you shouldn't go biting into fruit offered to you by magical creatures in the woods, even if you'd thought until just five minutes ago that such stories were, you know, only stories.

Alina Radoi -

they say that girls are the ones who want fairy tail endings, but then again, who are the authors of fairy tales? mostly men...

Andrew Lang - The Red Fairy Book

Why should I laugh?' asked the old man. 'Madness in youth is true wisdom. Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it.

Cornelia Funke - Inkheart

She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still somewhere there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes. Don't dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind?

Misty Dawn Seidel - Dreams on Paper

May you never grow too old to believe in magic and fairy tales.

Glenn Beck -

My heart broke a little at her unblemished view of life: She still believed in innocent secrets, the heady rush of a good mystery, and happily ever after... (I wasn't about to disabuse her of those sweet notions.)...Little girls should be allowed to dream.

Molly Ringle - The Goblins of Bellwater

Yes, he knew it was crazy to be this obsessed over an encounter that had taken up maybe sixty seconds of his life. (Or had it been an hour and sixty seconds?) But what an encounter. His fingers still felt the bones and flesh through her sweater, his tongue still tasted her mysterious bitter-greens mouth, her voice still haunted him with that whispered 'Help me.

Jack D. Zipes - Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture

Rarely do wonder tales end unhappily. They triumph over death. The tale begins with "Once upon a time" or "Once there was" and never really ends when it ends. The ending is actually the beginning. The once upon a time is not a past designation but futuristic: the timelessness of the tale and its lack of geographical specificity endow it with utopian connotations - "utopia" in its original meaning designated "no place," a place that no one had ever envisaged. We form and keep the utopian kernel o

Jack D. Zipes - Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture

Since these wonder tales have been with us for thousands of years and have undergone so many different changes in the oral tradition, it is difficult to determine the ideological intention of the narrator, and when we disregard the narrator's intention, it is often difficult to reconstruct (and/or deconstruct) the ideological meaning of a tale. In the last analysis, even if we cannot establish whether a wonder tale is ideologically conservative, sexist, progressive, emancipatory, etc., it is the

C. JoyBell C. -

Fairy tales are not real. However, myths are the historical notes of those who were much wiser than ourselves. We therefore have no right to judge legends; lest we dare challenge demigods and angels.

Louise Welsh - Naming the Bones

I turned into Little Red Riding Hood. I made a cake, packed it up and went through the forest until I met the wolves. That's something the story got wrong, wolves don't travel solo, they hunt in packs.

Hans Christian Andersen - The Ugly Duckling

It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!

Terri Windling -

In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,' writes Dante, in The Divine Comedy, beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales: young heroes set off through the perilous forest in order to reach their destiny, or they find themselves abandoned there, cast off and left for dead. The road is long and treacherous, prowled by wolves, ghosts, and wizards — but helpers also appear along

Terri Windling - The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People

Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frig

Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

Luna had told us not to drop the rose, not to leave the path. But we never dropped the rose - it was on me the whole time - and we didn't leave the path, not really. We just took a shortcut through the shadows and the brush, something idiots have been doing in fairy tales since the beginning of time.

Brandi Salazar - Faerie Tales: The Misfortune of a Teenage Socialite

This was like being in one of those National Geographic magazines. We were among the natives now.

Kate Morton - The Forgotten Garden

Apart from such visits, for the first time in her life Eliza was truly alone. In the beginning, unfamiliar sounds, nocturnal sounds, disturbed her, but as the days passed she came to know them: soft-pawed animals under the eaves, the ticking of the warming range, floorboards shivering in the cooling nights. And there were unexpected benefits to her solitary life: alone in the cottage, Eliza discovered that the characters from her fairy tales became bolder. She found fairies playing in the spider

Kate Morton - The Forgotten Garden

Apart from such visits, for the first time in her life Eliza was truly alone. In the beginning, unfamiliar sounds, nocturnal sounds, disturbed her, but as the days passed she came to know them: soft-pawed animals under the eaves, the ticking of the warming range, floorboards shivering in the cooling nights. And their were unexpected benefits to her solitary life: alone in the cottage, Eliza discovered that the characters from her fairy tales became bolder. She found fairies playing in the spider

Amy Zhang -

We fall asleep to fairy tales, and the world rotates and revolves and time passes and we grow up and we understand that they are false. There are not heroes and princesses and villains. It's not that easy.

Alice Hoffman - The Marriage of Opposites

I knew what happened in fairy tales. The strong survived while the weak were eaten alive.

Related Quote Subjects