Best 488 quotes in «fairy tales quotes» category

...remember that the danger that is most to be feared is never the danger we are most afraid of.

Reprenant une goulée de cervoise, le capitaine s’essuya les lèvres avec sa manche, se pencha vers Célian en posant une main sur la table. Dans ses yeux brillaient une joie écumante, une envie presque palpable de les accompagner, alors qu’il reprenait d’un ton confident : - Tout jeune, il m’a été dévoilé un fait essentiel : il y a toujours deux chemins. Un chemin facile qui est vite parcouru et, un autre, plus difficile. Dur et semé d’embûches mais dont la récompense est à la hauteur des efforts. - C’est vrai, approuva le hérisson picotier-colporteur en replongeant son museau dans une purée de carottes accompagnée de feuilles de laitue. - Choisir le plus dur chemin est éprouvant. On y gagne au moins un caractère bien trempé. Tu verras, Célian, bien des choses dans ta vie… Sache qu’une erreur n’en est pas une si on apprend de celle-ci. - Je tiendrai compte de vos conseils, capitaine Ghyralem, assura sagement le Sorcelier. - Alors ça ira, moussaillon. Le repas se poursuivit et Axys conta une vieille histoire de Chaz à propos d’un lièvre féérique, facile à apercevoir mais impossible à attraper.

Returning to bed, Rachel strokes Zachariah's black curls as he drifts into sleep and appreciates the shape and fractal geometry there, the self-similarity and infinity of scale. She breathes in at his scalp, then presses her ear to his, listening for the clamour of voices within, to the long line of fighting men who made him, his head a seashell. There is a template for the fighting man. Rachel listens across three times nine countries, as the fairy-tale saying goes, across three times nine countries in the thirtieth tsardom . . .

Rosina had the fierce charm of the rather nasty girl in the fairy-tale who fails to get the prince, but is more interesting than the girl who does, and has better lines too.

Rough palms cradled my face while my fingers gripped the pillow on either side of his. Lips, teeth, tongue, mingled together. I ate him up and didn’t let go until I had to come up for air.

Science has never killed or persecuted a single person for doubting or denying its teaching, and most of these teaching have been true; but religion has murdered millions for doubting or denying her dogmas and most of these dogmas have been false. All stories about gods and devils, of heavens and hells, as they do not conform to nature, and are not apparent to sense, should be rejected without consideration. Beyond the universe there is nothing and within the universe the supernatural does not and cannot exist. Of all deceivers who have plagued mankind, none are so deeply ruinous to human happiness as those imposters who pretend to lead by a light above nature. The lips of the dead are closed forever. There comes no voice from the tomb. Christianity is responsible for having cast the fable of eternal fire over almost every grave.

Screw fairy tales. My life was way more interesting.

Seeing is not believing, it is only seeing,” George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin

Seeing the transformation in Aaron made me wonder how it would feel to have someone-even a not-so-nice guy like Aaron- look at me the way he looked at Anjali.

She’d been let down enough times to know not to believe in fairy tales.

She'd fall back asleep dreaming of hurricanes whipping the palm trees around her childhood home, trying to run from the Godzilla-sized beast that rushed to devour her. But her feet were stuck in invisible cement. As she struggled to scream, she'd startle awake and feel the staccato beats of her heart thumping double-time. Only then would she remember: she brought him into this world. - The Monster In Her Bedroom, Havok Magazine, Issue 1.1

She had not meant to name them, but she could not help herself; and having done so she thought, Let their names be symbols that their lives are worth the keeping. Let them struggle a little the harder, to keep their names.

...she has been bewitched by a wicked sorceress, and will not regain her beauty until she is my wife.' 'Does she say so? Well if you believe that you may drink cold water and think it bacon'.

She's as old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death.

She is a figure of legend and fairy tale, one to be taken seriously, or she might knock you off your feet with a quick whirl of the staff she carries everywhere.

She moves like beauty, she whispers to us of wind and forest—and she tells us stories, such stories that we wake in the night, dreaming dreams of a life long past. she reminds us of what we used to be. She reminds us of what we could be.

Sometimes I look at this world and it moves me to tears. The joy and terror and the mad bloody drama of it all. I wonder why they never seem to really see it. Maybe one lifetime just isn't enough. Or maybe it's too much. I can't say. But the truth, to be perfectly plain, is that people are always looking for magic in all the wrong places.

She was so lovely, it hurt his chest to gaze at her, especially knowing she was courageous and clever too.

Silence is another element we find in classic fairy tales — girls muted by magic or sworn to silence in order to break enchantment. In "The Wild Swans," a princess is imprisoned by her stepmother, rolled in filth, then banished from home (as her older brothers had been before her). She goes in search of her missing brothers, discovers that they've been turned into swans, whereupon the young girl vows to find a way to break the spell. A mysterious woman comes to her in a dream and tells her what to do: 'Pick the nettles that grow in graveyards, crush and spin them into thread, then weave them into coats and throw them over your brothers' backs.' The nettles burn and blister, yet she never falters: picking, spinning, weaving, working with wounded, crippled hands, determined to save her brothers. All this time she's silent. 'You must not speak,' the dream woman has warned, 'for a single world will be like a knife plunged into your brothers' hearts.' You must not speak. That's what my stepfather said: don't speak, don't cry, don't tell. That's what my mother said as well, as we sat in hospital waiting rooms -- and I obeyed, as did my brothers. We sat as still and silent as stone while my mother spun false tales to explain each break and bruise and burn. Our family moved just often enough that her stories were fresh and plausible; each new doctor believed her, and chided us children to be more careful. I never contradicted those tales. I wouldn't have dared, or wanted to. They'd send me into foster care. They'd send my young brothers away. And so we sat, and the unspoken truth was as sharp as the point of a knife.

Since these wonder tales have been with us for thousands of years and have undergone so many different changes in the oral tradition, it is difficult to determine the ideological intention of the narrator, and when we disregard the narrator's intention, it is often difficult to reconstruct (and/or deconstruct) the ideological meaning of a tale. In the last analysis, even if we cannot establish whether a wonder tale is ideologically conservative, sexist, progressive, emancipatory, etc., it is the celebration of wonder that constitutes its major appeal. No matter what the plot may be, this type of tale calls forth our capacity as readers and potential transmitters of its signs and meanings to wonder. We do not want to know the exact resolution, the "happily ever after," of a tale - that is, what it is actually like. We do not want to name God, gods, goddesses, or fairies, who will forever remain mysterious and omnipotent. We do not want to form graven images. We do not want utopia designated for us. We want to remain curious, startled, provoked, mystified, and uplifted. We want to glare, gaze, gawk, behold, and stare. We want to be given opportunities to change, and ultimately we want to be told that we can become kings and queens, or lords of our own destinies. We remember wonder tales and fairy tales to keep our sense of wonderment alive and to nurture our hope that we can seize possibilities and opportunities to transform ourselves and our worlds.

Snow came back, but she didn't come back right.

Sometimes,' Beauty said softly, sipping from her silver goblet, 'everyone needs to let the beast inside them out for a while'. She laughed, a sound like a waterfall meeting the sea and more glitter escaped from her fingertips. 'I like to see it. We all have our dark lusts. We should enjoy them.

Snow and Rose didn't know that they were living in a fairy tale--people never do.

Some foolish people must have a tragedy, for they cannot believe in happy endings

Sometimes humans just don't listen, they ‘take’ to fill a space that’s missin’!" Deetkatu, Meet the Little People...An Enchanting Adventure

Some women have kissed—and some are kissing—a lot of frogs, even though the very first man that they have each kissed was and is still a prince.

Somewhere, there lives your fairy tale... go find it.

Somewhere in the far away distance, the briny, laughing sees of Cadoett rejoiced with a new heart-filled tune and beckoned sleepy eternity. Like intrepid, passionate sailors, two new lovers boldly faced everlasting, silver oceans of unfathomable mystique and sailed away toward love’s sweet shores.

So was she on the side of dragons and indifferent to the fate of princesses?

so that it isn't upsetting to anybody. It's something we've always known about fairy tales – they talk about incest, the Oedipus complex, about psychotic mothers, like those of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, who throw their children out. They tell things about life which children know instinctively, and the pleasure and relief lie in finding these things expressed in language that children can live with. You can't eradicate these feelings – they exist and they're a great source of creative inspiration.

So when she looked in the mirror one day, and saw the beginning of thorny protrusions on her legs, a slight greenish tinge to her skin, she sighed. It was inevitable. - The Monster In Her Bedroom, Havok Magazine, Issue 1.1

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.

Storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets.

Sure. If she gets mugged, she can just flute them to death.

That's it? That's all that happens after you topple from grace? We lose our rubies and rations?" Marshall smirked. "Woe is me.

That's the tragedy of fairy tales. The whole world puts them on a pedestal. People want their lives to be magical, but what people don't understand is that happiness is sacrificed. There is so much more to the story than what is written. The Cinderella you think she's so unfortunate with her mean sisters and stepmom. You think she deserves a happy ending with a prince, but the twenty-page journey is all you see. You learn little about who she is. What if Cinderella's just a good actress who has everyone fooled, when really, she sucks. She more than sucks.

Thankfully, the farmers understand my request that the children not be allowed to peer through the windows at me. It would be alarming for them to see me with their dolls, to see me using the knife on their faces. There are some things children never should see.

The combination of razor-sharp wit (completely real) and his credentials (completely fake) had won them over in the end.

The best lies stay close to the truth.

The demon of revenge had already taken hold of his heart. The cancer of injustice had already eaten at his cheerful soul, leaving a skeleton of a carcass behind, one that could never feel compassion for humans—or anything else—again.

The Dark Fairy touched her chest. No heart, like her sisters. So where did the love come from?

The Dreamer awakes The shadow goes by The tale I have told you, That tale is a lie. But listen to me, Bright maiden, proud youth The tale is a lie; What it tells is the truth.

The End" is just the beginning.

The extremity of her sensitivity impressed a richly idle princely family, of her discomfort, bothered as she had to be by the absurd softness of the ample beddings, not to mention the pillow piles aggravating her much lamented acrophobic dis-ease. [from the poem, Princess and the Pea]

The euphoric lust cloud is gone and once the smoke begins to clear, like in all good fairytales, the princess turns into nothing more than a common farm girl while the prince goes back to being a regular frog.

The fairy tale is not the conclusion, but the doorway to a more brilliant reality. Pushed onto a pedestal as the final answer their worth is misshapen and distorted. The world’s story may end with a couple living happily ever after but our life in Christ enables the intimacy of the human relationship to illuminate an eternal perfection. In a balanced perspective, neither denigrated nor exalted from their intended place, fairy tales are a lovely and exhilarating part of life.

The fairy tale of film—created with the magic of animation—is the modern equivalent of the great parables of the Middle Ages. Creation is the word. Not adaptation. We can translate the ancient fairy tale into its modern equivalent without losing the lovely patina and savor of its once-upon-a-time quality. We have proved that age-old kind of entertainment based on the classic fairy tale recognizes no young, no old.

The eternal child. - We think that play and fairy tales belong to childhood: how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time of life to live without play and fairy tales! We give these things other names, to be sure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidence that they are the same things - for the child too regards play as his work and fairy tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from a pedantic division of life into different stages - as though each brought something new - and a poet ought for once to present a man of two hundred: one, that is, who really does live without play and fairy tales.

The fairy tale belongs to the poor...I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity.

The French fairy tale writers were so popular and prolific that when their stories were eventually collected in the 18th century, they filled forty–one volumes of a massive publication called the Cabinet des Fées. Charles Perrault is the French fairy tale writer whom history has singled out for attention, but the majority of tales in the Cabinet des Fées were penned by women writers who ran and attended the leading salons: Marie–Catherine d’Aulnoy, Henriette Julie de Murat, Marie–Jeanne L'Héritier, and numerous others. These were educated women with an unusual degree of social and artistic independence, and within their use of the fairy tale form one can find distinctly subversive, even feminist subtext.