Adult Fairy Tales Quotes & Sayings

I am married to a prince who will one day be a king. Usually this is where the fairy tale ends. Stories don't go much further than this moment, and I fear there's a good reason for it. A sense of dread hung over today, a black cloud I still can't get rid of. It is an unease deep in the heart of me, feeding off my strength. — Victoria Aveyard

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

I published my first book in 1982 - a collection of Irish folklore called Irish Folk & Fairy Tales. It is still in print today. My first young adult book was published a couple of years later, and I've been writing in both genres ever since. — Michael Scott

No amount of wavy blond hair nor evenings spent with her plump lips applying just the right amount of pressure to his various pleasure points could make up for the rotting carcass of a soul that resided beneath all that beauty. — Nicki Elson

What Hans had intended to end at a simple kiss quickly escalated into something neither one of them seemed able to stop. — Nicki Elson

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality. — Elizabeth Bowen

As a child, I loved fairy tales because the story, the what-comes-next, is paramount. As an adult, I'm fascinated by their logic and illogic. — Gail Carson Levine

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. — Angela Parkhurst

Many people think fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales are only for children, but I'm not the only writer to take an old tale and retell it for a sophisticated adult audience. — Kate Forsyth

A parent who from his own childhood experience is convinced of the value of fairy tales will have no difficulty in answering his child's questions; but an adult who thinks these tales are only a bunch of lies had better not try telling them; he won't be able to related them in a way which would enrich the child's life. — Bruno Bettelheim

How would I feel about hearing that the plague killed another nearby village a month later? Didn't I tell you stupidity is the eighth sin?
Excerpt From: Cameron Jace. . — Cameron Jace

In fairy tales, the children are saved by caring adults. We need more caring adults in the lives of our children. — Donna Shalala

Never stray from your own kind, Jessen," my mother would say, "or you could end up like Princess Morga, a slave and outcast to be abhorred."

The problem was, I'd never been a very obedient daughter. Never the one to do exactly as I was told. And fairy tales have no meaning when the stars align and Fortune spins her wheel, weaving her own story for your heart. — Juliette Cross

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, roused by the promise of true love, and find he had a witch to destroy. A heart to steal. To tear from the rib cage, where it was cushioned by bloody velvet, and deliver it to the queen who demanded the princess's death.
Girls became victims and heroines.
Boys became lovers and murderers.
And sometimes ... they became both. — Sarah Cross

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. — Marissa Meyer

Nobody knew exactly how the zombification process worked, and there were as many different strains as theories. — Nicki Elson

In a sense, every human construction, whether mental or material, is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists in constant chaos. Thus children's fairy tales as well as adult's legends, cosmological myths, and indeed philosophical systems are shelters built by the mind in which human beings can rest, at least temporarily, from the siege of inchoate experience and of doubt. — Yi-Fu Tuan

At the end of the day, I fight for those who cannot fight for themselves. If that makes me an outlaw, so be it. I've been called worse. — Angela Parkhurst

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. — Anna Sheehan

But wishes are only granted in fairy tales. — Simone Elkeles

He met each newly exposed piece of flesh with a tender kiss, remembering how he'd dreamed of doing exactly this on the very first night he'd seen her. — Nicki Elson

Maybe if more of our adolescents had been brought up on fairy tales, they would (unconsciously) remain aware of the fact that their conflict is not with the adult world, or society, but really only with their parents. Further, threatening as the parent may seem at some time, it is always the child who wins out in the long — Bruno Bettelheim

There is no adult terror equivalent to what an innocent child experiences when first confronted with the truth that evil is not merely a figment of fairy tales, that it walks the world in countless forms, and that what it seeks most aggressively is the destruction of the innocent. — Dean Koontz

Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for very young children, this is a relatively modern idea. In the oral tradition, magical stories were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, while literary fairy tales (including most of the tales that are best known today) were published primarily for adult readers until the 19th century. — Terri Windling

It is usually assumed that children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories. In describing a fairy-story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: "this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty." But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that began thus: "this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy"; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate. Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything, even old theatre programmes or paper bags. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I never read any fairy tales or classics until I was an adult; all we ever had was comics ... No television, either. If we wanted entertainment, we hung around the fish shop. — Michael Foreman

Where, then, do we find the truth? We find it in the body, in the woods, in the water, in the soil. We find it in music, dance, and sometimes in poetry. We find it in a baby's face, and in the adult's face behind the mask. We find it in each other's eyes, when we look. We find it in an embrace, which is, when we feel into it, being to being, an incredibly intimate act. We find it in laughter and sobs, and we find it in the voice behind the spoken word. We find it in fairy tales and myths, and the tales we tell, even if fictional. Sometimes embroidering a tale enlarges it as a vehicle for the truth. We find it in silence and stillness. We find it in pain and loss. We find it in birth and death. — Charles Eisenstein

Who am I kidding? This isn't a fairy tale. It's my life. — Zoe Cruz

Keep your sword close and your friends closer. — Kiley Kellermeyer

Faith is not just thinking you can do things, but believing god can handle all things! — Philip Cook

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

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. — C.S. Lewis