Fairy Stories Quotes & Sayings

What do you know of the Knights?" he asked.

Fin shrugged. "I thought knights were only in children's stories until a few days ago."

Jeannot smiled. "A man could do worse than to live in the stories of a child. There is, perhaps, no better remembrance."

"Until the child grows up and finds out the stories aren't true. You might be knights, but I don't see any shining armor," Fin said.

Jeannot stopped near the gate of the auberge and faced her. "Each time a story is told, the details and accuracies and facts are winnowed away until all that remains is the heart of the tale. If there is truth at the heart of it, a tale may live forever. As a knight, there is no dragon to slay, no maiden to rescue, and no miraculous grail to uncover. A knight seeks the truth beneath these things, seeks the heart. We call this the corso. The path set before us. The race we must run. — A.S. Peterson

People like to talk about "Cinderella stories," but Cinderella didn't get her happy ending without lifting a finger. She had to show up at the ball, be charming and smooth, and win over the prince. Of course she had help along the way, but ultimately it was up to her to make the fairy-tale ending happen. — Michael Oher

Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you're at the end of the book, and it's only the end of a chapter. — Deb Caletti

As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm. — Tanith Lee

I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.
Then of course the Man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. As obligation to feel can freeze feelings. (from the essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's To Be Said) — C.S. Lewis

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?' — Nicolas Roeg

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. — Marina Warner

Most happy stories are fantasies that never happened. A form of wish fulfillment. ( ... ) Telling happy stories that actually happened lends a sort of fairy-tale quality to real life. They remind the teller and the listener of the magic that can be found in the mundane if you pay close attention. — Megan McCafferty

historically fairy tales were women's stories, passed orally in a time when women didn't have many rights. — Nora Roberts

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic. — Amy Tan

In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories . . . your science fiction stories . . . your Westerns . . . your fairy tales. Get it?" "Yes," Roland said. "Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?" "I guess that's close enough," Susannah said. "Does no one eat stew?" Roland asked. — Stephen King

Why are so many of us enspelled by myths and folk stories in this modern age? Why do we continue to tell the same old tales, over and over again? I think it's because these stories are not just fantasy. They're about real life. We've all encountered wicked wolves, found fairy godmothers, and faced trial by fire. We've all set off into unknown woods at one point in life or another. We've all had to learn to tell friend from foe and to be kind to crones by the side of the road ... — Terri Windling

Many fairy tales and ballads present us with animals who are nobler, truer, and kinder than the greedy human beings who desire to possess them. I guess I tend to read these stories as very early (and possibly unconscious) feminist texts. — Delia Sherman

There are stories where you must wear out your iron shoes to right a wrong, where children are baked into pies, where jealousy cuts off hands and cuts out hearts. We forget, because the stories end with those ritual words - happily ever after - all the darkness, all the pain, all the effort that comes before. People say they want a fairy tale life, but what they really want is the part that happens off the page, after the oven has been escaped, after the clock strikes midnight. They want the part that doesn't come with glass slippers still stained with a stepsister's blood, or a lover blinded by an angry mother's thorns. If you live through a fairy tale, you don't make it through unscathed or unchanged. Hands — Kat Howard

The humans aren't stupid, no matter what the purebloods say; they're just blind, and sometimes, that's worse. They put their fear in stories and songs, where they won't forget it. "Up the airy mountains and down the rushy glen, I dare not go a-hunting for fear of little men." We've given them plenty of reasons to fear us. Even if they've almost forgotten - even if they only remember that we were beautiful and not why they were afraid - the fear was there before anything else. There were reasons for the burning times; there's a reason the fairy tales survive. And there's a reason the human world doesn't want to see the old days come again. — Seanan McGuire

My dream was to eventually make movies. To be part of the fairy tales, stories and novels I loved reading so much growing up. — Irena A. Hoffman

Now fairy stories are at risk too, like the forests. Padraic Column has suggested that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when people could read and be productive after dark, something fundamental changed, and there was no longer need or space for the ancient oral tradition. The stories were often confined to books, which makes the text static, and they were handed over to children. — Sara Maitland

A week ago, I would have snorted at those words. Love was no more real than the "god" Amy worshipped. I'd heard of "love" in the same context that I heard of those religious fairy tales - as stories Sol-Earth people used to tell to make themselves feel better about the imperfect world they helped to create.

But now... — Beth Revis

Fairy tales are just true stories that humans have chosen not to believe in any more. Besides, this is Myths and Legends where dreams and nightmares come to life. — Stacie Simpson

Fairy tales and stories of fantasy bridge the gap and inspires the heart and mind wherever religious thought reaches its limits or meets a dead end. In other words, fairy tales are spiritual in nature, rising above set dogmas and traditions to provide a modern and universal spiritual nourishment for the human soul. — Alaric Hutchinson

It's an invention, a fairy tale devoid of any sense, like all the legends in which good spirits and fortune tellers fulfill wishes. Stories like that are made up by poor simpletons, who can't even dream of fulfilling their wishes and desires themselves. I'm pleased you're not one of them, Geralt of Rivia. It makes you closer in spirit to me. If I want something, I don't dream of it - I act. And I always get what I want. — Andrzej Sapkowski

Myths are different than fairy tales or legends. Legends are stories based in history and are more or less true. Myths, on the other hand, are stories containing a deeper truth - stories that transcend time. If you were to travel the world, you would find myths that are remarkably similar to one another - stories of heroes fighting the darkness with the light. — Seth Adam Smith

I'm not sure whether that had to do with the humor, or with the unfashionable fairy-tale ending, which is very different from much of what I read in The New Yorker, where short stories seem to end with someone staring off at the white walls of a white room, and you think that something's happened but you're not quite sure what. — Jennifer Weiner

To me God's voice and inspiration is stronger, of greater importance and authority than that of any fairy or any other spirit like creature from above or below earth. My Spirit Tales are stories based on truth and inspired by His writings.
Stories about YHWH and His great wonderful acts are definitely not fairytales but Spirit Tales. — Sipporah Joseph

It's almost a sort of fairy story tale, just what a novelist would write about a discovery. — Charles Hard Townes

It's the shape of the stories that matters, the way belief forms around it. The story has real weight', He pointed at himself. 'Patupaiarehe look like monsters in some stories, but they're beautiful in a lot. I guess people believed more in the beautiful version. And the ideal of beauty changes. If I'd been born two hundred years ago, I bet I wouldn't look like this. The stories shaped me. They shape everyone, inside and out, but me more than most, because I'm magic. — Karen Healey

My inspiration is my life, what I see happening around me. It can be history and, quite often, plain traditional fairy tales. But I never adapt; I nourish myself with old stories, and then create my own tales. — Michel Ocelot

Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit. — Marina Warner

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? — J.R.R. Tolkien

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

Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams. — Glen Duncan

I loved [fairy stories] so, and my mother weighed down by grief had given up telling me them. At Nohant I found Mmes. d'Ardony's and Perrault's tales in old editions which became my chief joy for five or six years ... I've never read them since, but I could tell each tale straight through, and I don't think anything in all one's intellecutal life can be compared to these delights of imagination. — George Sand

Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.
For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. So upon logic was founded the nonsense that displays itself in the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll. If men really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-stories about frog-kings would not have arisen. — J.R.R. Tolkien

It wasn't chance at all, Gilly. People are yearning creatures. They imagine and strive and hope. Stories about an enchanted band of vagabonds existed before the Carnival itself. But those fairy tales become the focal point of billions of daydreams, and eventually those daydreams condensed like vapor into something real. The Carnival only exists because you want it to, you and everyone else. So why's it peculiar that, when you wanted to find it, a path came into existence too? — Kristopher Reisz

As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths - intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard's beard. — Laini Taylor

I love monsters, I love creatures, I love beings, I love aliens. That's more supernatural and more the stuff of fairy tales. Fairy tales are as ancient as we are. I love those stories. I think they're really interesting because they always have more than simply the fright aspect. There's something deeply psychological. — Denis O'Hare

They sat close to each other, and he told her a story about her eyes. They were beautiful dark lakes in which her thoughts swam about like mermaids. And her forehead was a snowy mountain, grand and shining. These were lovely stories. — Hans Christian Andersen

Love in the real world doesn't usually work out the way stories make us think it should. We don't always get fairy-tale endings. People split up and move on. Just because you love someone doesn't mean you can't love someone else. - Georgina to Brandy — Richelle Mead

Fairy tales are stories of triumph and transformation and true love, all things I fervently believe in. — Kate Forsyth

I was telling stories before I could write. I like to tell stories, and I like to talk to things. If you]ve read fairy tales, you know that everything can talk,from trees to chairs to tables to brooms. So I grew up thinking that, and I turned it into stories. — J. California Cooper

Everything is always my fault. I touch things and they crumple into shit, like the opposite of King Midas and his gold finger. If I was in a fairy tale, I would be called "PooFinger", and everyone would shun me and make me go live in some naff shack under a bridge, telling scary stories to all the children in the kingdom about the wench who turns everything to shit, just by touching it. — Holly Bourne

From time to time you'll see documentaries about low-ranked wolves who somehow rise to the top of the pack - an omega that earns a position as an alpha. Frankly, I don't buy it. I think that, in actuality, those documentary makers have misidentified the wolf in the first place. For example, an alpha personality, to the man on the street, is usually considered bold and take-charge and forceful. In the wolf world, though that describes the beta rank. Likewise, an omega wolf - a bottom-ranking, timid, nervous animal - can often be confused with a wolf who hangs behind the others, wary, protecting himself, trying to figure out the Big Picture.
Or in other words: There are no fairy tales in the wild, no Cinderella stories. The lowly wolf that seems to rise to the top of the pack was really an alpha all along. — Jodi Picoult

A child ... who has learned from fairy stories to believe that what at first seemed a repulsive, threatening figure can magically change into a most helpful friend is ready to believe that a strange child whom he meets and fears may also be changed from a menace into a desirable companion. — Bruno Bettelheim

If you look at children's stories in fairy tales, they're pretty brutal. — Susanne Bier

When we think about fairy tales, we think about happily ever afters, forgetting the darkness that stories beginning with "once upon a time" so often contain.
I tried to protect Shay from that darkness. But there was no way to shield her from the truth: Life is not a fairy tale. — Laura J. Burns

In the old stories, despite the impossibility of the incidents, the interest is always real and human. The princes and princesses fall in love and marry
nothing could be more human than that. Their lives and loves are crossed by human sorrows ... The hero and heroine are persecuted or separated by cruel stepmothers or enchanters; they have wanderings and sorrows to suffer; they have adventures to achieve and difficulties to overcome; they must display courage, loyalty and address, courtesy, gentleness and gratitude. Thus they are living in a real human world, though it wears a mythical face, though there are giants and lions in the way. The old fairy tales which a silly sort of people disparage as too wicked and ferocious for the nursery, are really 'full of matter,' and unobtrusively teach the true lessons of our wayfaring in a world of perplexities and obstructions. — Andrew Lang

People had contested the whole basis of the idea of God's power on earth, and they had done it with reasoning that was beautiful and compelling. Darwin said creation stories were a fairy tale. Freud said we had power over ourselves. Spinoza said there were no miracles, no angels, no need to pray to anything outside ourselves: God was us, and nature. Emil Durkheim said humans fantasized religion to give themselves a sense of security. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

When does real love begin?
At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity.
At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?
At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession. — Anais Nin

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. — Holly Black

The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed. — G.K. Chesterton

Kiran says (the shelf) is full of stories. If it is, then I like fairy stories. Fairy stories are fair. In them wishes are granted, words are enchanted, the honest and brave make it safely through to the last page and the baddies either have to give up their wickedness for ever and ever, no going back, or get ruthlessly written out of the story, which they hardly ever survive. Also in fairy stories there are hardly any of those half-good half-bad people that crop up so constantly in real life and are so difficult to believe in ... — Hilary McKay

All experiences are stories to be told and must be written. — Lailah Gifty Akita

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

distinguish hearsay from what we've seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we "remember" our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention — Orhan Pamuk

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 wanted to avoid what some modern tellers have done, quite legitimately, to make fairy tales more like novels and short stories, to characterize the heroes and the heroines much more than they are characterized in Grimm. I like the psychological flatness of them, the fact that they're more like masks than individuals. — Philip Pullman

A lot of the stories were highly suspicious, in her opinion. There was the one that ended when the two good children pushed the wicked witch into her own oven ... Stories like this stopped people thinking properly, she was sure. She'd read that one and thought, Excuse me? No one has an oven big enough to get a whole person in, and what made the children think they could just walk around eating people's houses in any case? And why does some boy too stupid to know a cow is worth a lot more than five beans have the right to murder a giant and steal all his gold? Not to mention commit an act of ecological vandalism? And some girl who can't tell the difference between a wolf and her grandmother must either have been as dense as teak or come from an extremely ugly family. — Terry Pratchett

The association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the "nursery," as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. — J.R.R. Tolkien

As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield, I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn't actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course, as we all know from fairy stories, when you achieve that ambition, you find out you don't want it. — Jarvis Cocker

I bring this up because in writing some thoughts about a father, or not having a father, I feel as though I'm writing a book about a troll under a bridge or a dragon. For me, a father was nothing more than a character in a fairy tale. I know fathers are not like dragons because fathers actually exist. I have seen them on television and sliding their arms around their wives in grocery stores, and I have seen them in the malls and in the coffee shops, but these were characters in other people's stories. The sad thing is, as a kid, I wondered why I couldn't have a dragon, but I never wondered why I didn't have a father. (page 20) — Donald Miller

Story of O is a fairy tale for another world, a world where some part of me lived for a long time, a world that no longer exists except between the covers of a book. — Anne Desclos

As his boots walked towards the old station, he felt as though he were hallucinating. Scary apprehension increased the beat of his heart and the sweat upon his forehead was cold. The reality of where he stood created a sinking feeling inside of him.
An old man everyone called Uncle Tucker once owned this place. His sole existence behind the counter all of the time, day and night. He could have been a creature out of a fairy tale, with his long white beard and equally long white hair. Merlin. The overalls and the ball cap perched upon his head, along with the half-smoked cigar with an endless burning orb positioned in his mouth. It made him a fixture in time. He wondered if Tucker would still be alive. Tucker with his endless stories of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and flower children. A man that never left a country thousands of miles away where bicycles filled the capital. A man who never left those fields where killing occurred. — Jaime Allison Parker

Did this mean every impossible fairy tale was grounded somewhere in absolute truth? Was there anything sane or normal at all, or was everything just magic and ghost stories? — Stephenie Meyer

In stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, they always say the heroine is 'as good as she is beautiful.' I wondered if people just wanted that to be true, wanted the beautiful to be good. I wondered if they wanted the ugly to be bad because then they wouldn't have to feel bad for them. — Alex Flinn

That is the true crime that fairy tales commit - making people like me think that we counted in this world. I was neither hot nor in shape. I was just a normal boy in an extraordinary world, and stories like that, no matter how misleading and destructive, would always appeal to people like me. — John Goode

We all love stories, even if they're not true. As we grow up, one of the ways we learn about the world is through the stories we hear. Some are about particular events and personalities within our personal circles of family and friends. Some are part of the larger cultures we belong to - the myths, fables, and fairy tales about our own ways of life that have captivated people for generations. In stories that are told often, the line between fact and myth can become so blurred that we easily mistake one for the other. This is true of a story that many people believe about education, even though it's not real and never really was. It goes like this: Young children go to elementary school mainly to learn the basic skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. These skills are essential so they can do well academically in high school. If they go on to higher education and graduate with a good degree, they'll find a well-paid job and the country will prosper too. — Ken Robinson

Away with them, away; we should not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good. Think of them as persons from the fairy wood. — Stevie Smith

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. — Emma Trevayne

I've been very influenced by folklore, fairy tales, and folk ballads, so I love all the classic works based on these things
like George Macdonald's 19th century fairy stories, the fairy poetry of W.B. Yeats, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's splendid book The Kingdoms of Elfin. (I think that particular book of hers wasn't published until the 1970s, not long before her death, but she was an English writer popular in the middle decades of the 20th century.)
I'm also a big Pre-Raphaelite fan, so I love William Morris' early fantasy novels.
Oh, and "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees (Neil Gaiman is a big fan of that one too), and I could go on and on but I won't! — Terri Windling

When my mom was alive, she read me stories every night. "Use your imagination, Lorelei," she'd say, "and your whole life can be a fairy tale." I wanted that to be true. But I should have paid more attention to the fairy tales. — Nikki Loftin

But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed. — Andrew Lang

The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels - peculiarly artistic,1 beautiful, and moving: 'mythical' in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Fairy tales are much more than silly bedtime stories," the teacher continued. "The solution to almost every problem imaginable can be found in the outcome of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are life lessons disguised with colorful characters and situations. "'The — Chris Colfer

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

It was only as part of the civilizing process that storytelling developed within the aristocratic and bourgeois homes, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through governesses and nannies, and later in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries through mothers, who told bedtime stories. — Jack D. Zipes

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

Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men. -On Fairy Stories — J.R.R. Tolkien

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. — Mark Helprin

Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. "Once upon a time" is how all the best children's stories begin, and "prostitute" is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let's keep that beginning. — Paulo Coelho

I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories. — Hedy Lamarr

Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people's lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day. — Diana Wynne Jones

The children will need new stories and fairy tales to see them through their nightmares and daydreams, to transfigure their sorrows and fears at not being able to remain children forever. — Keith Donohue

The term - 'Fairy-Tales' is so ironical in itself, when I sometimes sit to write love stories with a happy ending, it usually drags me into a dilemma whether, I should even begin with a love story at first place or not? Because honestly, I haven't seen many of them reaching climax, most of them just die out in the mid. Then comes the concept of fairy tales or what we say 'fiction', where nothing is impossible!
But over time, if I've realized something, it is that there's no such term called fiction when it comes to reality! Its harsh, in-your-face-sarcastic, ironical and highly irrational. You can't expect what's coming up next, and how it's going to blow you. In the real life, the entire meaning of fiction ceases to exist. Conclusively, we writers, deal with harsh reality and write lively fictions, this job in itself is so ironical but, that's life ... — Mehek Bassi

But as she continued and finished her tale, I could tell that her heart was elsewhere, and when she excused herself to go to bed, she left without saying good night. After that, the princesses in her stories were always beautiful. Always. — Kelly Barnhill

She always did like tales of adventure-stories full of brightness and darkness. She could tell you the names of all King Arthur's knights, and she knew everything about Beowulf and Grendel, the ancient gods and the not-quite-so-ancient heroes. She liked pirate stories, too, but most of all she loved books that had at least a knight or a dragon or a fairy in them. She was always on the dragon's side by the way. — Cornelia Funke

He famously defended fairy stories against those who said they told children that there were monsters; children already know that there are monsters, he said, and fairy stories teach them that monsters can be killed. We now know that the monsters may not simply have scales and sleep under a mountain. They may be in our own heads. — Terry Pratchett

A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them. — Gilbert Ryle

Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches. — Willa Cather

There are no fairy tales in the wild, no Cinderella stories. The lowly wolf that seems to rise to the top of the pack was really the alpha all along — Jodi Picoult

For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written - heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world. — Angela Carter

Remember that stories are more than just words, more than fairy tales. They are magic. — Valya Dudycz Lupescu

Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons. — Catherynne M Valente

If you read fairy tales carefully, you'll notice they are mostly about people who aren't heroes. They don't have special powers, or gifts. Often they are despised as stupid, They are bullied, beaten up, robbed, starved. But they find they are stronger than their misfortunes. — Amanda Craig

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? — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Fairy tales are rife with transformation - from beast to handsome prince, from dirty scullery maid to well-dressed princess. It is perhaps no coincidence that nature in the Cinderella stories facilitates transformation, for nature itself is a changeable thing, from season to season, from a sunny day to rain, from an egg to a flying bird in a matter of weeks.
(Source: "The Nature of Cinderella".) — Marie Rutkoski

In the stories, the old fairy tales, a hero comes. But all my heroes are gone or dead. No one is coming for me. — Victoria Aveyard

The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. The grandfather was pleased with himself. The thin child found no one in this story with whom to sympathise. Except maybe the snake, which had no asked to be made use of as a temper.
The snake wanted simply to coil about in the branches.
What was there in the beginning in the Asgard stories?
In the first age there was nothing. Nor sand, nor the sea, nor cold waves; there was no earth, no sky on high. The gulf galped and grass grew nowhere. — A.S. Byatt

Do you have children, Dominick?"
"Nope."
"Well if you did," she said, "you would most likely read them not only Curious George but also fables and fairy tales. Stories where humans outsmart witches, where giants and ogres are felled and good triumphs over evil. Your parents read them to you and your brother. Did they not?"
"My mother did," I said.
"Of course she did. It is the way we teach our children to cope with a world too large and chaotic for them to comprehend. A world that seems, at times, too random. Too indifferent. Of course, the religions of the world will do the same for you, whether you're a Hindu or a Christian or a Rosicrucian. They're brother and sister, really; children's fables and religious parables ... — Wally Lamb

Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines. — C.S. Lewis

There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state. — Andre Breton