Best 488 quotes in «fairy tales quotes» category

I know these are only dreams. I know these days are long past. I wake to a dream in which Hammer’s breath has stopped, and mine with it, and hearts have gone to a quiet sunny meadow with the sweetest little cottage in the middle, with a millwheel and a stream. Our bodies will lie tangled until they become earth, like roses twining so closely there is no beginning and no end, and only the shades of beauty that were their growing. Every dream I ever had as a child has come true, simply because Hammer loved me. Perhaps this one will too.

I know we can't do anything about those who couldn't even say they're sorry...but maybe...maybe we can do something about how we feel inside.

I learned that we may meet a true love and that our lives may be transformed by such an encounter even when it does not lead to sexual pleasure, committed bonding, or even sustained contact. The myth of true love-that fairy-tale vision of two souls who meet, join, and live happily ever thereafter-is the stuff of childhood fantasy. Yet many of us, female and male, carry these fantasies into adulthood and are unable to cope with the reality of what it means to either have an intense life-altering connection that will not lead to an ongoing relationship or to be in a relationship. True love does not always lead to happily ever after, and even when it does sustaining love still takes work.

I like stories where women save themselves.

I like fairy tales, and I like dreaming. I try to weave the reality into the dream.

I love the fact that Perrault's princess goes on living and struggling after she finds her prince, and that Perrault doesn't shrink from the weirdness of Sleeping Beauty being over a hundred years old but having the body of a lithe young thing. When the prince wakes her, he considers telling her she's wearing the kind of clothes his grandmother used to wear, but decides it's best not to mention it just yet.

Il Principe diede mano alla Principessa perché si alzasse: ella era già abbigliata e con gran magnificenza: ed egli fu abbastanza prudente da farle osservare, che era vestita come la mi’ nonna, e che aveva un camicino alto fin sotto gli orecchi, come costumava un secolo addietro.

Imagine a perfect world

I’m always amazed by how readily people judge the right and wrong of things they know only from the outside. Honestly, it kind of pisses me off.

I marched to the head Elf. “Where’s the frog?

I’m glad she’s so smitten with her new huntsman boyfriend and all, but venison-wurst? Gag me with a harpsichord.

I’m going to drag you down to the basement, kneel at your feet, rip your jeans down and I’m going to make you come so hard with my tongue the whole damn pub will think you’re being murdered.

I'm here because all fairy tales take place in the woods, King Cole, even those that don't.

I'm learning that's marriage. At least it's the kind of marriage I want. And I know I want said that our fairy tale is on hold for a while, but I don't think that's true now. This is the fairy tale. We are living it. Fairy tales were never really about a perfect end to a story. It's the day by day living that counts. I like that scenario better anyway. At least it's real.

I'm not a princess but Ryan is a knight, he just belongs to someone else.

In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen. ... Lear goes berserk on a heath but comes out of it for a few brief hours every inch a king. Zaccheus climbs up a sycamore tree a crook and climbs down a saint. Paul sets out a hatchet man for the Pharisees and comes back a fool for Christ.

In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected." (Frauds on the Fairies, 1853)

In each of us is a hidden child. It’s nice when the child wakes up because the world of imagination is a tremendous place to play.

In England in the 19th century, advances in printing methods, combined with the rise of a prosperous middle class, engendered a booming new industry of books published just for children. Casting about for cheap story material, English publishers laid hands on the subtle, sensual adult fairy tales of the Continental tradition and revised them into simpler stories instilled with Victorian values. Although these simplified versions retained much of the violence of the older stories, elements of sexuality and moral complexity were carefully scrubbed away — along with the fiesty heroines who appeared everywhere in the older tales, tamed now into models of Victorian propiety and passivity. In the 20th century, the Walt Disney Studios watered down the tales further still in popular animated films like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, continuing the trend of turning active heroines into powerless damsels in distress. Walt Disney considered even the Victorian versions of the tales too dark for 20th century audiences. "It's just that people now don't want fairy stories the way they were written," Disney commented. "They were too rough."

IN MY DEFENSE, I didn’t mean to start the Apocalypse. It wasn’t just my personal aversion to oblivion; I had a clear financial motive: The end of the world is bad for business.

In the colored fairy books of Andrew Lang (The Red Fairy Book, The Blue Fairy Book, etc.), there is a figure who has always intrigued me: the Hen Wife, related to the witch, the seer, and the herbalist, but different from them too: a distinct and potent archetype of her own, an enchanted figure beneath a humble white apron. We find her dispensing wisdom and magic in the folk tales of the British Isles and far beyond (all the way to Russia and China): a woman who is part of the community, not separate from it like the classic "witch in the woods"; a woman who is married, domesticated like her animal familiars, and yet conversant with women's mysteries, sexuality, and magic.

I noticed him right away. No, it wasn’t his lean, rugged face. Or the dark waves of shiny hair that hung just a little too long on his forehead. It wasn’t the slim, collarless biker jacket he wore, hugging his lean shoulders. It was the way he stood. The confident way he waited in the cafeteria line to get a slice of pizza. He didn’t saunter. He didn’t amble. He stood at the center, and let the other people buzz around him. His stance was straight and sure.

I shook my head. “I thought you had a ‘No princesses’ rule.” “Rules are made to be broken,” said Grimm. Ari sat back in the chair, her eyes closed. “Of course, young lady, there’s the matter of how we sign our contracts.” “Not gonna happen.” Ari threw a pen at the mirror for emphasis.

In the end it wins a king's daughter, who is expected to burn its hedgehog-skin at night, and does so, and finds herself clasping a beautiful prince, all singed and soot-black. Christabel says, 'And if he regretted his armoury of spines and his quick wild wits, history does not relate, for we must go no further, having reached the happy end.

I reached out my hands to them, suddenly: I put out my hand to Sergey on one side, and to Stepon on the other, and they put out their hands to me, and to each other, and we held tight, tight; we made a circle together, my brothers and me, around the food that we had been given, and there was no wolf in the room.

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 the way, good fairies and animal guides, often cloaked in unlikely disguises. The hero's task is to tell friend from foe, and to keep walking steadily onward.

I once heard a panel discussion among magazine editors, who voiced their common greatest problem: to find people who can write. A generation has grown up lacking skill in composition and any sense of literary style. Though I doubt that any study of the matter has been made, my own experiences have borne out a theory that people who grow up hearing and reading folk and fairy tales throughout childhood develop not only lively imaginations, but originality in the use of words.

Is life a fantasy or fairy tales?

It can appear that Ellarie has it hard to be seen and to be heard. Sometimes this is her way and maybe not the best, but it is a way she often uses, I have to confess. Her invisible poke or pinch is to help those believe, in more than just a ghostly story or what the eyes can perceive. The brighter your light shines will give a clue, to the goodness you attract that follows you.” Trinity, The Little People Journey into the Mystic Sea

I squared my shoulders, trying to ignore the fact that I was standing in the apartment of the sea witch, wearing a fairy-tale prom gown, waiting for the attack of the mermaids.

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

It could be said that the lectures changed the way many people thought about myth, fairy story, and poetry, and even about the relationship of imagination to thought and to language. One of the brilliant but cryptic insights he expressed was: ‘To ask what is the origins of stories … is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind.

It dawned on her as she grew older, that fairy tales instilled false hopes in people, and that no white knights existed in this world. The mothers should be well aware of that aspect of reality, so why they fed their daughters with the same crap for centuries baffled her.

It has generally been assumed that fairy tales were first created for children and are largely the domain of children. But nothing could be further from the truth. From the very beginning, thousands of years ago, when tales were told to create communal bonds in face of the inexplicable forces of nature, to the present, when fairy tales are written and told to provide hope in a world seemingly on the brink of catastrophe, mature men and women have been the creators and cultivators of the fairy tale tradition. When introduced to fairy tales, children welcome them mainly because they nurture their great desire for change and independence. On the whole, the literary fairy tale has become an established genre within a process of Western civilization that cuts across all ages. Even though numerous critics and shamans have mystified and misinterpreted the fairy tale because of their spiritual quest for universal archetypes or their need to save the world through therapy, both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.

The middle son gets a magic donkey. When you shout the word: "Bricklebrit!", it spews gold pieces out of... And I quote: ... its front and back. Yes, folks. Thing I Love #4: the Bricklebrit Donkey. You shout a word, and gold comes flying out its butt. Fairy tales don't get much better than that.

It is so delightful to teach those one loves!

It is one of the prime errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the “truth” and “original form” of a legend can be separated from its miraculous elements. It is in the marvels themselves that the truth inheres.

It is our responsibility to keep telling these tales--to tell them in a way that they teach and entertain and give meaning to our lives,' he [Jim] said later. 'This is not merely an obligation, it's something we must do because we love doing it.

It is time to put aside dreaming. Fairy tales are sweet on winter nights, nothing more.

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.

It is winter now, and the roses are blooming again, their petals bright against the snow. My father died last April; my sisters no longer write, except at the turning of the year, content with their fine houses and their grandchildren. Beast and I putter in the gardens and walk slowly on the forest paths. [from the poem, Beauty and the Beast: An Anniversary]

It's kind of strange...All these so-called myths and fables. Everyone seems to have the same ones. They cross cultures and continents. Everyone has their own versions of unicorns, witches, even the Fates. Now we know why. Because they're real.

It's like a fairy tale, and we're the shadows who are turning back into boys.

It's wrong and unhealthy to deny a child the world of make-believe.

It’s true; I have never been abandoned by my best friend. Even so, I think no one is really exempt from being hurt. I was hurt, too...and you may not know how I felt like...how it felt like...to be abandoned by your own mother.

It was our passion for words and our ardent desire to write that drew me and Michael together, and the same that drove us apart. Michael wanted to be a great playwright, like the former master Molière. He had high ambitions and scorned what I wrote as frivolous and feminine. ‘All these disguises and duels and abductions,’ he said contemptuously, one day a year or so after our affair began, slapping down the pile of paper covered with my sprawling handwriting. ‘All these desperate love affairs. And you wish me to take you seriously.’ ‘I like disguises and duels.’ I sat bolt upright on the edge of my bed. ‘Better than those dreary boring plays you write. At least something happens in my stories.’ ‘At least my plays are about something.’ ‘My stories are about something too. Just because they aren’t boring doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy.’ ‘What are they about? Love’ He clasped his hands together near his ear and fluttered his eyelashes.’ ‘Yes, love. What’s wrong with writing about love? Everyone longs for love.’ ‘Aren’t there enough love stories in the world without adding to them? ‘Isn’t there enough misery and tragedy?’ Michael snorted with contempt. ‘What’s wrong with wanting to be happy? ‘It’s sugary and sentimental.’ ‘Sugary? I’m not sugary.’ I was so angry that I hurled my shoes at his head.

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.

It was a glistening citadel of limestone, hard and smooth with creamy whites and speckled grays. This was, no doubt, the place mighty kings called home, and with awe, it stole Fawn’s breath away.

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.

It was the Kojagar full moon, and I was slowly pacing the riverside conversing with myself. It could hardly be called a conversation, as I was doing all the talking and my imaginary companion all the listening. The poor fellow had no chance of speaking up for himself, for was not mine the power to compel him helplessly to answer like a fool? But what a night it was! How often have I tried to write of such, but never got it done! There was not a line of ripple on the river; and from away over there, where the farthest shore of the distant main stream is seen beyond the other edge of the midway belt of sand, right up to this shore, glimmers a broad band of moonlight. Not a human being, not a boat in sight; not a tree, nor blade of grass on the fresh-formed island sand-bank. It seemed as though a desolate moon was rising upon a devastated earth; a random river wandering through a lifeless solitude; a long-drawn fairy-tale coming to a close over a deserted world,—all the kings and the princesses, their ministers and friends and their golden castles vanished, leaving the Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers and the Unending Moor, over which the adventurous princes fared forth, wanly gleaming in the pale moonlight. I was pacing up and down like the last pulse-beats of this dying world. Every one else seemed to be on the opposite shore—the shore of life—where the British Government and the Nineteenth Century hold sway, and tea and cigarettes.