Fairy Quotations

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

I don't know what my formula is. I only know I like my characters to walk in clouds. I like a little bit of the fairy tale. Let others photograph the ugliness of the world. I don't want to distress people.

When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in 'Horse, Flower, Bird' I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.

I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them

My life is a fairy tale. You could not make it up.

I was the original Cinderella girl, looking for the happy ending in the fairy story. But my fantasy prince never came.

To me, a fairy tale seems to have become reality.

I began to believe the fairy tales: You know, how we're all out there looking for our magical missing half.

Gifts fall from heaven only in fairy tales.

As a child, I loved fairy tales because the story, the what-comes-next, is paramount. As an adult, I'm fascinated by their logic and illogic.

When you think of Grimm's fairy tales, they are deeply, deeply psychological. They're so powerful, so bloody, and really, really disturbing. Think about five-year-olds reading that stuff. Even 'Little Red Riding Hood' is a really freaky story. Grandma is gobbled up by a wolf, and the wolf is going to eat the girl. That's scary stuff.

I grew up in a household without a TV. We lived next door to a library for a while, and at one point, I checked out all the books in the fairy tale section. I remember the librarian's quiet smile as I'd bring back one stack and exchange it for another.

Fairy tales were important to me. Aren't they for any kid? My sister says I spent a good five years of my youth convinced I would grow up to be a princess.

You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that's a fairy tale - definitely.

Throughout any given season of 'The Bachelor,' the women exclaim that the experience is like a fairy tale. They suffer the machinations of reality television, pursuing - along with several other women, often inebriated - the promise of happily ever after.

I worked with Stanley Kubrick for almost a year back in 1990, trying to develop the screen story for his project 'Artificial Intelligence,' which is about a robot boy who wishes to become a real boy, a future scientific fairy tale inspired in the myth of Pinocchio.

Everything is for sale in Hollywood; the fairy tale, the costume, the pumpkin, the footman and the mice.

I will always have a soft spot for 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon,' which I discovered just at the age when I was beginning to enjoy the darkness in fairy tales but still wanted a story where the good guys win.

I like to escape; I like to write when I go on a walk - I'm kind of very fairy that way. I get inspired by the wind. Or when I daydream, that's when I write.

When fairy tales are written in the west, they're known as folklore. In the east, fairy tales are called religions.

I grew up with a lot of fairy tales. And they had an essence of darkness to them.

I was raised on the brothers Grimm, but my favorite fairy tales in the world are Oscar Wilde's - 'The Nightingale and the Rose,' 'The Selfish Giant.' The latter is probably my all-time favorite.

Yes, hell exists. It is not a fairy tale. One indeed burns there. This hell is not at the end of life. It is here. At the beginning. Hell is what the infant must experience before he gets to us.

Fairy tales, before they were sanitized, were very dark, and kids love that. 'Coraline' by Neil Gaiman feels like Beckett for kids. I think there's plenty of room for that. And I think there's a danger of being too patronizing to children, having things too sanitized.

'Extraordinary' is an original fairy tale, a contemporary story. But like a traditional fairy tale, it heads quickly into frightening, bloody territory. I am afraid for my book, as it goes out alone into the world, just as I was frightened for Phoebe as I wrote and rewrote her story.

As I read more and more fairy tales as an adult, I found massive collusion between their 'subjects' and those in my fiction: childhood, nature, sexuality, transformation. I realized that it wasn't by accident that I was drawn to their narrative structure and motifs.

I have never dreamed of being a princess. I have not longed for Prince Charming. I have and do long for something resembling a happily ever after. I am supposed to be above such flights of fantasy, but I am not. I am enamored of fairy tales.

Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.

There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.

I do a lot of urban fantasy, which is modern-day cities, but you've got magic, you've got fairies running around, or cryptozoological creatures running around, and I'm pulling very heavily on my background as a folklore major and having done some animation work and all of that, and I'm pulling from the modern fairy tale narrative.

My parents read me fairy tales every night and I used to believe I was a fairytale princess, like every young girl. I had all the Disney dressing-up costumes and would play every character.

When I was 11, I had an Ugly Sister birthday party. All my idea. Most girls want to be a fairy or a princess, but there I am with beauty spots and fur and fluorescent pink kiss-curls.

In the old fairy tales, often a 'moral' was tacked on at the end of the story - say, if a book was going to be marketed to young readers. And the morals don't really suit the stories at all, which makes them super weird - part of why I love the tradition so much. I do play with this, though I am more concerned with ethics than morals.

By fairy hands their knell is rung; / By forms unseen their dirge is sung.

A romantic novel is an adult fairy story, repeating the recurring symbols and images which can explain life to a woman and satisfy a powerful need within her. The need to love and be loved is vital to all human beings, but especially to women.

Why should a horror film be just a horror film? To me, The Company of Wolves is a fairy tale; it's got all those elements plus a lot more. And we know that fairy tales aren't innocent any more.

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.

What works about fairy tales is that they endure, and the great thing about fairy tales is that you can explore big, epic things that you can't really explore in other situations.

I'm an interpreter of stories. When I perform it's like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.

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.

When I first read Anne Frank's 'Diary of a Young Girl,' I saw for the first time that a girl could be a writer and that it had something to do with survival and with ethics and fighting against evil. I admired her, though her diary remained terrifying and mysterious to me. She was a character in a real fairy tale - fairy tales are brutal.

I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.

Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands!

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

I am 39. I am single. I am a black woman. I have too many advanced degrees. Many a news story tells me finding true love is likely a hopeless proposition. Now is the time when I need to believe in fairy tales.

I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

I want to be the best mum and I want everything to be perfect - I want a fairy tale really.

Once upon a time, I was a little girl sick in the hospital, and my mother gave me a copy of 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' to comfort me.

It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.

And now, I'm a best selling author, a different sort of fairy tale that I still sometimes wonder when I'll wake up from.

I'm not sure if it's fair to call it a 'fairy tale,' but I really loved 'Mulan,' the Disney film. It was my favorite. I guess it's not really a fairy tale, but you do get Eddie Murphy as a dragon.

I always wanted the fairy tale, but now I want someone who is a great partner.

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.

There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we're succeeding in some small way.

I think people should read fairy tales, because were hungry for a mythology that will speak to our fears.

As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale.

The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good character, or give a good ending to a bad character. That's probably not a very postmodern thing to say.

I like being scared, so I've always liked fairy tales because they're kind of creepy.

My fairy-tale life ended the moment I wanted to apply for a passport.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

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.

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

All the ancient classic fairy tales have always been scary and dark.

I love that very traditional fairy tale where it's not all 'happily ever after.' I like all that old school, bloody, 'Brothers Grimm' sort of stuff. So you have all those shades of gray in there.

Sleepy Hollow had a lot of action in it, even though it was a fairy-tale movie.

Seeing my parents makes me realise that life is not a fairy tale.

Sometimes, violent details have been eliminated from fairy tales simply because they were deemed too graphic. So one does not, at the end of Disney's version of 'Cinderella,' see the stepsisters' eyes get pecked and pecked by doves, because Disney wanted to market the story for wholesome family viewing.

One of the first houses we lived in was like out of a fairy story. We had a stream that ran through our garden, and we played with the ducks - we locked them in my mum's office, and they pooed everywhere. It was crazy, picking blackberries and mushrooms, rabbits running through your legs.

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

I love fairy tales because of their haunting beauty and magical strangeness. They are set in worlds where anything can happen. Frogs can be kings, a thicket of brambles can hide a castle where a royal court has lain asleep for a hundred years, a boy can outwit a giant, and a girl can break a curse with nothing but her courage and steadfastness.

I've always liked fairy tale and spectacle. I wouldn't say I was a fantasy fan, but anything beyond reality I've always found exciting - the work of David Lynch, the work of Tim Burton. But for me, I also love those things that are absolutely about human relationships.

My secret ambition was always to provide music for animation films: something with an Indian theme, either a fairy tale or mythological tale or on the Krishna theme. I still have a very deep desire, but these sorts of chances don't always come.

The spark for 'In Praise of Slowness' came when I began reading to my children. Every parent knows that kids like their bedtime stories read at a gentle, meandering pace. But I used to be too fast to slow down with the Brothers Grimm. I would zoom through the classic fairy tales, skipping lines, paragraphs, whole pages.

'Seconds' is grounded in the reality of this restaurant environment, and I did do plenty of research, so there's that. It takes place in a town that is like a kinder, gentler fairy tale version of reality. Then it takes off into a story that is very strange, very mental.

I loved reading Grimm's fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen, and I loved to dream about other worlds and other lives. Maybe that has something to do with having an incomplete family, being an only child. All I know is I loved to pretend, and all that was in tandem with my wanting to be an actress.

Well the wedding in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury was a fairy tale and there was a huge public impress, investment of goodwill, affection and indeed money in this Institution. It was a huge success at the time.

Many people think fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales are only for children, but I'm not the only writer to take an old tale and retell it for a sophisticated adult audience.

I never grew up reading or fantasizing about fairy tales. I was always too busy, like, outside being a kid.

As children, our imaginations are vibrant, and our hearts are open. We believe that the bad guy always loses and that the tooth fairy sneaks into our rooms at night to put money under our pillow. Everything amazes us, and we think anything is possible. We continuously experience life with a sense of newness and unbridled curiosity.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

Everytime a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

Conservatives used to believe in confronting hard truths, not succumbing to comforting fairy tales. Some still do.

All of my work is influenced by fairy tales, and I hope my work shows Hans Christian Anderson's influence.

The naturalist worldview is a good way to feel grounded and feel part of something that isn't based on fairy tales. It's based on observable facts in the human and in the biological history of the planet. I think that can be a source for comfort.

Every time a child says I don't believe in fairies there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

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.

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.

My first marriage was very traditional, in the church, and then we left the church and went to the reception hall. So this time, I'd like to go fairy tale all the way.

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

I didn't like fairy tales when I was younger. I found a lot of fairy tales scary. They really didn't sit well with me.

Don't make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I'm not.

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?'

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

You should treat a muse like a fairy.

Living in a zoo means it wasn't always sparkly dresses, but I would still dress up. I had this pink sparkly dress and fairy wings, and I'd put those on and then go and dance in the zoo.

One of the little girls brought her tooth money from the tooth fairy. So its making, for her, a large sacrifice. It meant enough to her to give up her tooth fairy money to help these little babies.

My father was a bank clerk. He was also a Utopian Socialist and he wrote a Utopian novel. It was a kind of allegory or fairy tale.

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels/ The dizzy dancing way you feel/ As every fairy tale comes real/ I've looked at love that way.

Nothing can be truer than fairy wisdom. It is as true as sunbeams.