Fairytales Quotes

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Cinderella? Snow White? What's that? An illness?”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Once we have accepted the story, we cannot escape the story's fate.”
― P.L. Travers

“The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.”
― Angela Carter

“I don’t want to be a Princess,” she said finally. “You can’t make me be one.” She knew very well what became of Princesses, as Princesses often get books written about them. Either terrible things happened to them, such as kidnappings and curses and pricking fingers and getting poisoned and locked up in towers, or else they just waited around till the Prince finished with the story and got around to marrying her. Either way, September wanted nothing to do with Princessing.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“Happily Single" is recognizing that you don’t need or want to be rescued from your life by a handsome prince because your life is pretty awesome, as is.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass

“But all fairytales have rules, and perhaps it’s their rules that actually distinguish one fairytale from the other. These rules never need to be understood. They only need to be followed. If not, what they promise won’t come true.”
― Jostein Gaarder

“For a momente she [Gretel] stopped and considered following the rain's advice. But then she shook her head. "You're being foolish," Gretel told herself. "Rain can't talk."

No, of course it can't. The moon can eat children, and fingers can open doors, and people's heads can be put back on.
But rain? Talk? Don't be ridiculous.
Good thinking, Gretel dear. Good thinking.”
― Adam Gidwitz, A Tale Dark & Grimm

“There was something familiar but strange about her - Snow White with a suntan. Cinderella in biker boots. Tough and delicate and magical and real all at once.”
― Allyse Near, Fairytales for Wilde Girls

“Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own “real” world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.”
― Leonard S. Marcus, The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy

“That idea...it was you.
You are the universe’s fairytale come true.”
― Nikita Gill, Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul

“Her lips were frosted with sugar and faeriedust.”
― Allyse Near, Fairytales for Wilde Girls

“The emperor is naked!"
The parade stopped. The emperor paused. A hush fell over the crowd, until one quick-thinking peasant shouted:
"No, he isn't. The emperor is merely endorsing a clothing-optional lifestyle!”
― James Finn Garner

“Fairytales by nature only talk about the victors. The survivors. Nobody speaks about what happens to those who failed, except in the abstract: as cautionary tales to guide others onto the path to success. How many brave knights fell to the dragon before he was slayed by the noble prince? How many children burned to a crisp and eaten before the wicked witch received her due? These stories are lost, but the lesson behind them is not: it is not enough to be merely pure and good.”
― Nenia Campbell, Evergloom

“Aunt Syl must have conveniently stopped reading the childhood fairy tales when the knight left the damsel in distress to pursue a better damsel out of my bedtime routine.”
― Rachel Higginson, Endless Magic

“The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing.
The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way.
1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection.
2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora.
3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy.”
― Diriye Osman, Fairytales for Lost Children

“Good for Christmas-time is the ruddy colour of the cloak in which--the tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through, with her basket--Little Red Riding-Hood comes to me one Christmas Eve to give me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling Wolf who ate her grandmother, without making any impression on his appetite, and then ate her, after making that ferocious joke about his teeth. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be; and there was nothing for it but to look out the Wolf in the Noah's Ark there, and put him late in the procession on the table, as a monster who was to be degraded.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Tree

“He burst into the house and ate Grandma, an entirely valid course of action for a carnivore such as himself.”
― James Finn Garner

“But this is a story,
and in a story
there is always someone
beautiful enough."

- 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects”
― Catherynne M. Valente

“Träume und Märchen waren ihr eigentlicher Lebensinhalt, dachte ich jetzt. Deshalb hat sie sich auch umgebracht, dachte ich, weil ein Mensch, der nur Träume und Märchen sich zu seinem Lebensinhalt gemacht hat, in dieser Welt nicht überleben kann, nicht überleben darf, dachte ich.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters

“There were two things about this particular book (The Golden Book of Fairy Tales) that made it vital to the child I was. First, it contained a remarkable number of stories about courageous, active girls; and second, it portrayed the various evils they faced in unflinching terms. Just below their diamond surface, these were stories of great brutality and anguish, many of which had never been originally intended for children at all. (Although Ponsot included tales from the Brothers Grimm and Andersen, the majority of her selections were drawn from the French contes de fées tradition — stories created as part of the vogue for fairy tales in seventeenth century Paris, recounted in literary salons and published for adult readers.)
I hungered for a narrative with which to make some sense of my life, but in schoolbooks and on television all I could find was the sugar water of Dick and Jane, Leave it to Beaver and the happy, wholesome Brady Bunch. Mine was not a Brady Bunch family; it was troubled, fractured, persistently violent, and I needed the stronger meat of wolves and witches, poisons and peril. In fairy tales, I had found a mirror held up to the world I knew — where adults were dangerous creatures, and Good and Evil were not abstract concepts. (…) There were in those days no shelves full of “self–help” books for people with pasts like mine. In retrospect, I’m glad it was myth and folklore I turned to instead. Too many books portray child abuse as though it’s an illness from which one must heal, like cancer . . .or malaria . . .or perhaps a broken leg. Eventually, this kind of book promises, the leg will be strong enough to use, despite a limp betraying deeper wounds that might never mend. Through fairy tales, however, I understood my past in different terms: not as an illness or weakness, but as a hero narrative. It was a story, my story, beginning with birth and ending only with death. Difficult challenges and trials, even those that come at a tender young age, can make us wiser, stronger, and braver; they can serve to transform us, rather than sending us limping into the future.”
― Terri Windling, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales

“Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.”
― Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men

“After all, in fairy tales, there was only one thing to do. In every story with a long sleep and a waking in it. An easy thing, a pretty thing. Standard currency.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“What do they say about meeting a bear in the woods? Oh right, you shouldn't. And to make sure you don't, you should make a lot of noise so that they'll will know where you are and keep their distance because, supposedly, they're as nervous of us as we are of them. Which is all goo, except this bear doesn't seem the least bit nervous. He's giving me a look like I'm Goldilocks, ate his porridge, broke his chair, slept in his bed, and now it's payback time."- Widdershins”
― Charles de Lint, Widdershins

“You’re my princess, right? You were always going to be my princess, no matter what you were born, no matter who your dad married.”
― Marissa Meyer, Winter

“لا تسخر من خرافات الشعوب. فهذه الخرافات هي التي أصبحت بعد ذلك حقائق كبرى..”
― أنيس منصور, الذين هاجروا

“Aber sie halten es für eine Legende!'
'Weil sie es dafür halten wollen. Vielleicht würden sich manche Märchen und Mythen als wahr herausstellen, wenn nur jemand den Mut aufbrächte, in einem Brunnen nach einer goldenen Kugel zu suchen oder die Dornenhecke vor einem Schloss zu zerschneiden.”
― Kai Meyer, Die Fließende Königin

“I will not wear a tulle-tailed dunce cap for anyone or for any reason.”
― Chautona Havig, Princess Paisley

“While the archetype of the tinker is generally the whipping person in classical bedtimes stories, this particular individual was a tinker by trade and just happened to be economically disadvantaged.”
― James Finn Garner

“You grew up soft. Your tender heart would nurse a frightened field mouse rescued from a trap. Would make a splint. You'd try to help but always it would die. You gave them names. You were a friendless child, a barrel-chested, sturdy little thing who played alone.
You grew up soft, but still you learned to hide it. Piece by piece. The world's not built for soft and sturdy things. It likes its soft things small and white, defenceless. Princesses in castles. Maidens waiting for the perfect sword. You grew up soft, and piece by wounded piece you built a carapace around your body. Humans are peculiar little things.”
― Deirdre Sullivan, Tangleweed and Brine