Kate Bernheimer Quotes & Sayings

All good fairy tales have meaning to many levels," Bruno Bettleheim observes in The Uses of Enchantment. "Only the child can know which meanings are significance to him at the moment. — Kate Bernheimer

It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams. — Kate Bernheimer

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. — Kate Bernheimer

Doll-less, invisible friend-less, finally more comfortable in fear than in gladness, Astrid began to live in her head. Or rather inside a small tunnel - a hole - in her head, through which she watched everything gaily depart. She nodded this head and pretended to listen. 'Bye-bye,' she would hear from within. — Kate Bernheimer

People tend to think of fairy tales as 'archetypal.' They are also extremely sensual, something which translates well over the ages. — Kate Bernheimer

It was in this way that my idea of brothers began-that brothers were sweet and needed much saving. — Kate Bernheimer

I think pink is one of the saddest colors in the world, and many American humans are taught not to take anything pink seriously, which is weird. — Kate Bernheimer

From sentence to sentence, in fairy tales there is no reality that is subordinated to any other. Just as, outside the pages there is no reality. — Kate Bernheimer

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. — Kate Bernheimer

The father washes his hands of his son, so the boy is forced to set out alone to try and find fear, hoping that by doing so he'll fit in, that finally he'll belong. That maybe once he can shudder, he'll be able to go home. That's a line that always got me, that part about the shudder and going home. — Kate Bernheimer

I often visit Maria Tatar's 'The Grimm Reader' for a cold dose of courage. Her translations come from the Brothers Grimm, whose now-famous collection of 'Kinder- und Hausmarchen' ('Children's and Household Tales') was first published in 1812. The book was not intended for young readers. — Kate Bernheimer

So the Giant. Maybe Jack had no particular giant in mind; maybe it was just a giant-sized hole in his dreams and desires that the big-G Giant later came forward to fill. — Kate Bernheimer

I have been transcribing those poems and considering how lucky we are to live longer than flowers, even if not much happens to us. — Kate Bernheimer

Well documented, the relationship of literature to myth in the Western world has undergone much change over the millennia, as first the age of gods fell away before the notion of a single god, and then, for many people, that single god slipped away, too. — Kate Bernheimer

Books are no different from goats! They enjoy an afternoon out on the lawn. — Kate Bernheimer

I know that human triumph is never fully redemptive. — Kate Bernheimer

The home in which you reside it not forever. — Kate Bernheimer

Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers. — Kate Bernheimer

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. — Kate Bernheimer

When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in 'Horse, Flower, Bird' I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book. — Kate Bernheimer

What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine. - from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 Rainer Maria Rilke — Kate Bernheimer

As a kid, being with her was easy; it was the nearest to heaven I've ever been. — Kate Bernheimer

With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species. — Kate Bernheimer

Beer bottles, whiskey bottles, brown glass, green. They fell to the lawn and I'd feel serene. Adam was king to my stilted queen. — Kate Bernheimer

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. — Kate Bernheimer

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. — Kate Bernheimer

Another gift is Pansy's love. Bathed in that love, Lyle in turn is gentle with other kids, especially with kids uneasy under their bragging, kids really as frightened as rabbits when a hawk darkens their world. Lyle's underweight presence steadies them, and he is sought after - but not exactly as a friend. He is more like Anansi the helpful spider of his favorite tales - a quiet ally who prefers his own company but skitters over to join you when you need him. — Kate Bernheimer

No longer could I root happily into my mother's company and find comfort in her rounded shape. There was no one to tell me the facts. How much nutrition to pull from the dirt? Would the beetles bring harm? And what of the worms? Friends, foe, or nevermind? — Kate Bernheimer

As a reader, coming to my reading as a writer immersed in fairytales, I can't help but notice in so many stories, plays, poems that I read, the sort of breadcrumbs of fairytale techniques, so I'm very excited when I notice that. — Kate Bernheimer

Sometimes, violent details have been eliminated from fairy tales simply because they were deemed too graphic. So one does not, at the end of Disney's version of 'Cinderella,' see the stepsisters' eyes get pecked and pecked by doves, because Disney wanted to market the story for wholesome family viewing. — Kate Bernheimer

All good animals have secret lives. — Kate Bernheimer

I love the idea of the 'vignette,' which is associated with the decorative, illustrative, small, and thus with the feminine, and thus easily maligned. I mean, Emily Dickinson wrote vignettes, right? — Kate Bernheimer

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. — Kate Bernheimer

As scientists have discovered - or perhaps explained is a better word, or perhaps identified - we now live in the age of the Anthropocene. The geologic age of the Anthropocene. Those high priests of material evidence have given us our own epoch like the Holocene, the Pleistocene! Apparently we now, it seems, have superhuman powers. — Kate Bernheimer

Thankfully, the farmers understand my request that the children not be allowed to peer through the windows at me.
It would be alarming for them to see me with their dolls, to see me using the knife on their faces. There are some things children never should see. — Kate Bernheimer

The fact that fairy tales remain a literary underdog-undervalued and undermined-even as they shape so many popular stories, redoubles my certainty that it is time for contemporary fairy tales to be celebrated in a popular, literary collection. Fairy tales hold the secret to reading. — Kate Bernheimer

You have the hey to the library," he said. "Only be careful what you read. — Kate Bernheimer

When humans become gods, when our wings grow so great as to beat about the very edges of the earth, no one can answer but us. — Kate Bernheimer

When I first read Anne Frank's 'Diary of a Young Girl,' I saw for the first time that a girl could be a writer and that it had something to do with survival and with ethics and fighting against evil. I admired her, though her diary remained terrifying and mysterious to me. She was a character in a real fairy tale - fairy tales are brutal. — Kate Bernheimer

Plain and simple, I hope, in a fairy tale way: in fairy tales it is often the humble to whom magic is revealed. — Kate Bernheimer