"I use to be Snow White, but I drifted."
— Mae West

"Let us proceed under the assumption that the fairy folk do exist and that I am not a gibbering moron."
— Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl El Mundo Subterraneo / Artemis Fowl)

"WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE
RAPUNZEL

For horse thieving, kidnapping, jail breaking, and using her hair in a manner other than nature intended!

REWARD"
— Shannon Hale (Rapunzel's Revenge)

"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws."
— Alice Hoffman

"Fear isn't so difficult to understand. After all, weren't we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual."
— Alfred Hitchcock

"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking."
— Albert Einstein

"Tink was not all bad: or, rather, she was all bad just now, but, on the other hand, sometimes she was all good. Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time. They are, however, allowed to change, only it must be a complete change."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

"The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in."
— W.H. Auden

"Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality -- for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely."
— Terri Windling

"I will tell you, too, that every fairy tale has a moral. The moral of my story may be that love is a constraint, as strong as any belt. And this is certainly true, which makes it a good moral. Or it may be that we are all constrained in some way, either in our bodies, or in our hearts or minds, an Empress as well as the woman who does her laundry. ... Perhaps it is that a shoemaker's daughter can bear restraint less easily than an aristocrat, that what he can bear for three years she can endure only for three days. ... Or perhaps my moral is that our desire for freedom is stronger than love or pity. That is a wicked moral, or so the Church has taught us. But I do not know which moral is the correct one. And that is also the way of a fairy tale.

(pp. 195-96 "The Belt" in In the Forest of Forgetting)"
— Theodora Goss

"It's like a fairy tale. . . on crack!"
— Hillary DePiano

"By first believing in Santa Claus, then the Easter Bunny, then the Tooth Fairy, Rant Casey was recognizing that those myths are more than pretty stories and traditions to delight children. Or to modify behavior. Each of those three traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward. These are stepped-up tests to build a child's faith and imagination. The first test is to believe in a magical person, with toys as the reward. The second test is to trust in a magical animal, with candy as the reward. The last test is the most difficult, with the most abstract reward: To believe, trust in a flying fairy that will leave money.

From a man to an animal to a fairy.

From toys to candy to money. Thus, interestingly enough, transferring the magic of faith and trust from sparkling fairy-dom to clumsy, tarnished coins. From gossamer wings to nickels... dimes... and quarters.

In this way, a child is stepped up to greater feats of imagination and faith as he or she matures. Beginning with Santa in infancy, and ending with the Tooth Fairy as the child acquires adult teeth. Or, plainly put, beginning with all the possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national currency. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected."
— Charles Dickens

"He was walking into Faerie, in search of a fallen star, with no idea how he would find the star, nor how to keep himself safe and whole as he tried. He looked back and fancied that he could see the lights of Wall behind him, wavering and glimmering as if in a heat-haze, but still inviting."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

"Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold...The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told me in my childhood than in any truth that is taught in life."
— Friedrich von Schiller

"At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it."
— C.S. Lewis

"A lot of the stories were highly suspicious, in her opinion. There was the one that ended when the two good children pushed the wicked witch into her own oven...Stories like this stopped people thinking properly, she was sure. She'd read that one and thought, Excuse me? No one has an oven big enough to get a whole person in, and what made the children think they could just walk around eating people's houses in any case? And why does some boy too stupid to know a cow is worth a lot more than five beans have the right to murder a giant and steal all his gold? Not to mention commit an act of ecological vandalism? And some girl who can't tell the difference between a wolf and her grandmother must either have been as dense as teak or come from an extremely ugly family."
— Terry Pratchett

"And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart"
— Oscar Wilde

"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."
— Natalie Nyquist (Quest for the High Places)

"Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother."
— John Connolly

"The fairy tale emanates 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."
— Jack Zipes

"Most folks knowed here's a lie, but moms and dads not wanting to admit their own lying about the Tooth Fairy and Santy Claus and all. Us lying to our folks, them lying to us, nobody wanted to admit to being the liar.

None of the other fifth-graders ratted on Rant or me, since they want to keep the money and figure more's coming.

Everybody caught trapped in the same Tooth Fairy lie.

You can get plenty of folks telling the same lie if they got a stake in it. You get everybody telling the same lie and it ain't a lie, not no more. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable."
— Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)

"One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about."
— Regina Doman

"Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!"
— Charles Lamb

"Fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers, not as realistic, but as symbolic poetry."
— Max Luthi

"By the many we prevail, by the few this spell will fail."
— Queen Marigold from 'Eleganta: A novel of Fairykind'

"I met a Lady in the Meads
Full beautiful, a fairy's child
Her hair was long, her foot was light
And her eyes were wild --"
— John Keats