Best 488 quotes in «fairy tales quotes» category

A fairy-tale life exists only in fairy tales.

A boy was regarded King to be, in a land only a child could see. We admit it could be a difficult task, just in case you are inclined to ask, for those who would even vaguely begin, to remember the child that comes from within, of a modern world still hardened by past and rules that can make you grow up fast. Yet into the imagination, we hope you escape, from beliefs that your life may potentially shape; try to let go of what you normally resist, while exploring the way nature and a boy co-exist.” See the Little People…An Enchanting Adventure

A boy was regarded King to be, in a land only a child could see. We admit it could be a difficult task, just in case you are inclined to ask, for those who would even vaguely begin, to remember the child that comes from within, of a modern world still hardened by past and rules that can make you grow up fast. Yet into the imagination, we hope you escape, from beliefs that your life may potentially shape; try to let go of what you normally resist, while exploring the way nature and a boy co-exist.

Aging and the prospect of dying by no means enhance the attractiveness of fictitious comforts to come in paradise, or the veracity of malicious myths about hellfire and damnation. Fear and feeblemindedness cannot be credibly pressed into service to support fantastic claims about the cosmos and our ultimate destiny. Whether one would even consider turning to religion in advanced years has much to do with upbringing, which makes all the more important standing up to the presumptions of the religious in front of children. One would regard the Biblical events – a spontaneously igniting bush, a sea’s parting, human parthenogenesis, a resurrected prophet and so on – that supposedly heralded God’s intervention in our affairs as the stuff of fairy tales were it not for the credibility we unwittingly lend them by keeping quiet out of mistaken notions of propriety.

a gang of unpredictable ruffians by day who turned to enthralling storytellers after dark. "I would sometimes join them, and listen for a great part of the night to some of the finest fairy tales and most romantic legends it has ever been my fortune to hear.

All these threads, like the ley-lines he'd read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on the Cicciaro girl, who lay there unaware, a glass-coffined beauty whose kingdom was in ruins.

Ah—now you think I have been lying to you, that this is only a story. It has a king in it. And while a story with Death might be true, a story with a king in it is always a fairy tale. But remember, this comes from a time when kings were as common as corn. Plant a field and you got corn. Plant a kingdom and you got a king. It is that simple.

All experiences are stories to be told and must be written.

All of the great mythologies and much of the mythic story-telling of the world are from the male point of view. When I was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces and wanted to bring female heroes in, I had to go to the fairy tales. These were told by women to children, you know, and you get a different perspective. It was the men who got involved in spinning most of the great myths. The women were too busy; they had too damn much to do to sit around thinking about stories. [...] In the Odyssey, you'll see three journeys. One is that of Telemachus, the son, going in quest of his father. The second is that of the father, Odysseus, becoming reconciled and related to the female principle in the sense of male-female relationship, rather than the male mastery of the female that was at the center of the Iliad. And the third is of Penelope herself, whose journey is [...] endurance. Out in Nantucket, you see all those cottages with the widow's walk up on the roof: when my husband comes back from the sea. Two journeys through space and one through time.

All the queens of my acquaintance have children, some three, some seven, and some as many as twelve; and my queen has not one. I feel ill-used." So he made up his mind to be cross with his wife about it. But she bore it all like a good patient queen as she was.

A long time ago in a kingdom by the sea there lived a princess as tall and bright as a sunflower.

Always look at the message, not the messenger!” The Little People, The Little People Journey into the Mystic Sea

ah, life— the thing that happens to us while we’re off somewhere else blowing on dandelions & wishing ourselves into the pages of our favorite fairy tales.

…a kingdom right on the shore, surrounded by gray mountains and bright green meadows. ‘Tis a place filled with fine castles born from the ocean, itself. The very walls are made of limestone and pearls, thick and heavy, a glistening, natural fortress soaked in golden sunlight. No man could calculate its worth, because it exceeds all of nature’s wealth. It is a great miracle, a grand dream not of our world. It is a beacon, a strong, gleaming lighthouse guiding great ships home. I dare not describe it more, for my words do not do it justice…

A make believe life doesn't win friends and influence people. It bores the crap out of those living the dream.

Am I the same cold, ragged damp Sara? And to think I used to pretend and pretend and wish there were fairies! The one thing I always wanted was to see a fairy story come true. I am living in a fairy story. I feel as if I might be a fairy myself, and able to turn things into anything else.

Americans live not by facts, but by a lengthy list of myths.

Am I really standing here, conversing with a bloody unicorn?" Tiffy was certain her mind had finally left the building.

and a table in a kitchen at which the nightingales feasted on fairy tales, the angels stuffed themselves with fog

And at the end of seven years the Queen of the Faeries pays a tithe to Hell,” Aikin finished, as he joined them. “That’s what it says in ‘Tam Lin’.

Apart from such visits, for the first time in her life Eliza was truly alone. In the beginning, unfamiliar sounds, nocturnal sounds, disturbed her, but as the days passed she came to know them: soft-pawed animals under the eaves, the ticking of the warming range, floorboards shivering in the cooling nights. And their were unexpected benefits to her solitary life: alone in the cottage, Eliza discovered that the characters from her fairy tales became bolder. She found fairies playing in the spiders' webs, insects whispering incantations on the windowsills, fire sprites spitting and hissing in the range. Sometimes in the afternoons, Eliza would sit on the rocking chair listening to them. And late at night, when they were all asleep, she would spin their stories into her own tales.

«And in the end» said the witch to the drowning prince «You've been the one choosing the thornless path in spite of knowing where it could lead. The one who afraid of the pricking roses, plunged himself into an abyss without petals

And then they lived happily, and we who hear the story are happier still.

And, they would still be alive today...If they hadn't died, that is

Anyway, it’s unthinkable! Dragons and knights are born enemies. They need to be enemies just like dogs hate cats, cats hate mice and mice hate scientists. Without somebody to hate where would all the hate go? The hate would just boil up inside you, eat away and cause you to have indigestion then a heart attack. We need to release the anger, and we release it on dragons who release it back on us. We slay them and they roast us. It is the natural order of things, Emma.

Apart from such visits, for the first time in her life Eliza was truly alone. In the beginning, unfamiliar sounds, nocturnal sounds, disturbed her, but as the days passed she came to know them: soft-pawed animals under the eaves, the ticking of the warming range, floorboards shivering in the cooling nights. And there were unexpected benefits to her solitary life: alone in the cottage, Eliza discovered that the characters from her fairy tales became bolder. She found fairies playing in the spiders' webs, insects whispering incantations on the windowsills, fire sprites spitting and hissing in the range. Sometimes in the afternoons, Eliza would sit on the rocking chair listening to them. And late at night, when they were all asleep, she would spin their stories into her own tales.

And I think I decided not to love Charlie because I thought I had to be rescued. For practical reasons but also as a proof of love. It's better that Charlie and I didn't make an automatic transaction, love exchanged for rescue. All you can do after that is put the love and the rescue up on the shelf, moving them farther and farther back as you make room for all the other items you acquire over the years. This way a ragged stem still grows between us, almost pretty. Though really we should crush it now, before the buds bloom skeletal.

[...] and the pea was put in the museum, where it can still be seen, if no one has stolen it.

And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. That too is a great advantage of the folk tale. It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary of its being blue- and not to notice how blue it is. And appreciation of the subtler colors of the sky will come later. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation. It is what will enable the child later on to understand Macbeth, or Don Quixote, or David Copperfield.

And those women were sneaky. They understood that including fantastical elements in their tales- golden eggs, signing harps, talking frogs- worked to mask a deeper purpose....it made the stories look on the surface like 'a mere bubble of nonsense' within which it was possible to 'utter harsh truths, to say what you dare' about the state of women's lives. Because they were just stories, right? Harmless little fantasies?

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.

As she put it, she knew of nothing so ravishing as having a child whom she could whip whenever she was in a bad mood. ("The Queen Fantasque")

As they climbed into the wagon, the widows thanked her again, and reminded her to be careful out there. There was danger in the woods, especially for a woman on her own. Fairies, demons, and shapeshifters who might take advantage of an unguarded lady.

Are you the same woman I brought here, Sasha? You're like a kid at Christmastime."--Monroe "You would be, too, if someone fulfilled your most secret fantasies."--Sasha

As the literary fairy tale spread in France to every age group and every social class, it began to serve different functions, depending on the writer's interests. It represented the glory and ideology of the French aristocracy. It provided a symbolic critique, with utopian connotations, of the aristocratic hierarchy, largely within the aristocracy itself and from the female viewpoint. It introduced the norms and values of the bourgeois civilizing process as more reasonable and egalitarian than the feudal code. As a divertissement for the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the fairy tale diverted the attention of listeners/readers from the serious sociopolitical problems of the times, compensating for the deprivations that the upper classes perceived themselves to be suffering. There was also an element of self-parody, revealing the ridiculous notions in previous fairy tales and representing another aspect of court society to itself; such parodies can be seen in Jacques Cazotte's "A Thousand and One Follies" (1746), Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "The Queen Fantasque" (1758), and Voltaire's "The White Bull" (1774). Finally, fairy tales with clear didactic and moral lessons were approved as reading matter to serve as a subtle, more pleasurable means of initiating children into the class rituals and customs that reinforced the status quo.

A story could lead you into a different world for a while. It might be a world where a foolish youngest son could turn into a brave and clever hero, or a beaten young woman could end up as a wise leader of folk. And when the story was ended and that world was gone, you still had the idea of it inside you. Like a flame that didn't go out even when the bad things rattled and swirled and screamed, and worse, oh, much worse, when they whispered and goaded and tormented.

But here's a great thing about stories: they can be retold.

But life is not a fairy tale. It's brighter and darker, longer and briefer, duller and more magical. It's full of contradictions, but one thing it's not is neat.

but the human heart has a bad habit of being hopeful.

Can you not see, […] that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is-what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is-what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.

Classic fairy tales do not deny the existence of heartache and sorrow, but they do deny universal defeat.

Clichés are relatives of the fairy tale, and tropes aren’t bad; they go with the territory.

Come sit, dear," the old woman said. "We were just discussing kelpies and changelings." I turned a delightfully amused face at Ronan, hoping to see him embarrassed to be caught in a world of fantasy, but his face was impassive, completely unperturbed. Those were the hardest boys to ignore: the ones that weren't concerned with your opinion of them, not afraid to be caught listening to fairytales.

Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing. Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless. Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live.

Corto à lui même: Ce serait bon de vivre dans une fable. Bouche Dorée à Corto: Oh oui!… Mais toi tu vis continuellement une fable et tu ne t'en aperçois plus. Lorsqu'un adulte entre dans le monde des fables, il ne peut plus en sortir. Le savais-tu?

Creators of literary fairy tales from the 17th-century onward include writers whose works are still widely read today: Charles Perrault (17th-century France), Hans Christian Andersen (19th-century Denmark), George Macdonald and Oscar Wilde (19th-century England). The Brothers Grimm (19th-century Germany) blurred the line between oral and literary tales by presenting their German "household tales" as though they came straight from the mouths of peasants, though in fact they revised these stories to better reflect their own Protestant ethics. It is interesting to note that these canonized writers are all men, since this is a reversal from the oral storytelling tradition, historically dominated by women. Indeed, Straparola, Basile, Perrault, and even the Brothers Grimm made no secret of the fact that their source material came largely or entirely from women storytellers. Yet we are left with the impression that women dropped out of the history of fairy tales once they became a literary form, existing only in the background as an anonymous old peasant called Mother Goose.

Cress . . . " He seemed torn, but also hopeful and unguarded. He took a deep breath. "She looked like you.

As it so happens, Mr. Jest, I’ve sometimes come to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast…

At midmorning the next day, she stood out by the line, hanging the laundry up to dry. But when she reached into the basket for the last item, a worn, moss-green shirt, she found it empty. Looking up, she saw the little fox holding the shirt in its mouth. It leapt, dropping the shirt, then picked it up again.

At least that left hope for him. Except "Beauty and the Geek" wasn’t exactly the proper translation of the popular fairy tale.