Quotes & Sayings About Scheherazade

No, her secret was too weighty and dark to reveal to anyone - she had to bear it alone. - "I had to keep breaking into his house," Scheherazade said. — Haruki Murakami

You'll tell me a story and I'll spare you ? You think I don't see what you're doing ? I've read Arabian Nights."
"Call me Scheherazade, baby ! Actually, she's one tricksy bitch. Who, by the way, still owes me twenty gold pieces and a pound of sesame. — Kresley Cole

Storytellers continue their narratives late into the night to forestall death and to delay the inevitable moment when everyone must fall silent. Scheherazade's story is a desperate inversion of murder; it is the effort, throughout all those nights, to exclude death from the circle of existence. — Michel Foucault

His eldest daughter, who was his delight and pride, Scheherazade said to him, "Father, I have a favour to ask of you. Will you grant it to me?" "I can refuse you nothing," replied he, "that is just and reasonable." "Then listen," said Scheherazade. "I am determined to stop this barbarous practice of the Sultan's, and to deliver the girls and mothers from the awful fate that hangs over them." "It would be an excellent thing to do," returned the grand-vizir, — Anonymous

I've always though of writing as the opposite of suicide," she said. "That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it."
"Like Scheherazade?"
"Yes," she said. "Spinning tales to forestall her execution ... — Ruth Ozeki

The lapis lazuli worry beads, draped over his rear view mirror, swung back and forth like the hips of Scheherazade, Mohammed's favorite belly dancer, who refused, in spite of the war, to leave Baghdad. — Leslie Cockburn

So he was a sort of anti-Scheherazade, Dunia told him, the exact opposite of the storyteller of The Thousand Nights and One Night: her stories saved her life, while his put his life in danger. — Salman Rushdie

She would take him to faraway lands to observe foreign ways, so he could get closer to the strangeness within himself. — Fatema Mernissi

-On sharing the love story of the Persian prince Khushraw and the niece of the queen of Armenia Shirin (who were looking for each other but in opposite directions): Both lovers then departed, looking for each other in opposite directions, a theme universal in its pathos, because we all spend our brief lives doing just that, even if we physically share our beds with the same person every night for years. Always we carry an image in our head of a better person, of an ideal person, which blurs our chances of finding happiness. — Fatema Mernissi

By Cunning & Craft is a masterpiece of writing about writing. If, like Scheherazade, you had to spin out a story under threat of death, this is the how-to book to read. It's filled with thoughtful, nuanced advice from a teacher/writer who actually writes, and writes beautifully and with great humor. The list of rejected stories is worth the price of the whole book. — Nora Gallagher

I see the carpet reflecting that narratological structure of the storytelling, with Scheherazade as the outside frame story on the outside, with the stories woven on the inside. It's also demonstrative of the infinity of it, with no beginning and no end. The carpet is also a kind of metonym for cinema, this idea that the flat surface carries a terrific depth of imaginative field while remaining totally flat. — Marina Warner

The technique of the book and the technique carried by the figure of Scheherazade is one of opening the Sultan's mind. He's emblematic of the ignorant person: the ignorant, lock-in, raging man who wants to kill all he doesn't understand. The model of the book is the extraordinary, very-large, Mirror of Princes. — Marina Warner

You are insistent, calling again. You want me to tell you the story of Scheherazade, who rocks the sad king on her knees as she sings him tales from wonderland. Yet you know that I am not Scheherazade, and that one of the world's greatest wonders is that I am unable to enter my country or pass through the region around it. — Liana Badr

There's a whole slew of wonderful speculation of flying in a fanciful way. Gulliver is one of the central examples; Swift has the hum of Arabian Nights in his ear with Gulliver's Travels. The difference is in scale - Gulliver as a kind of Sinbad kind of figure, the way he is picked up and carried. Just to finish up with Scheherazade, I do think that The Arabian Nights could be considered as a great book on women's position in the world. — Marina Warner

My intention was to grapple with the metaphysical meaning behind Scheherazade and present that meaning in its essence. Scheherazade is the symbol of the savior. She weaves tales not to save her own life, but to save humanity from its unending retributive response to injury. — Alonzo King

Stories are masks of God.
That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.
Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.
Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.
So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them. — Melanie Tem

So Scheherazade began. — Anonymous

Scheherazade, of course, was always in the back of my mind, because she's also a storyteller identified as female who tells a lot of anti-female stories. There's a parade in The Arabian Nights of sorceresses, adulteresses, ghouls, sirens, harridans. — Marina Warner

They showed me that it was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice. It was Scheherazade all over again - not in her millenary world, where everything was possible, but in a irreparable world, where everything had already been lost. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next. — E. M. Forster

Scheherazade is the classical example of a woman saving her head by using it. — Esme Wynne-Tyson