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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?'

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.

You mocking changeling- fairy-born and human-bred!

Mademoiselle is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously.

We call them faerie. We don't believe in them. Our loss.

Maybe she was being so hoity-toity because she didn't have her own fairy godmother.

We are all born with genius. It's like our fairy godmother. But what happens in life is that we stop listening to our inner voices, and we no longer have access to this extraordinary ability to create poetry.

The public has become my fairy godmother.

Yesterday I put on my Confederate uniform for the first time and looked like a fairy doorman at the Beverly Wiltshire - a fine thing at my age.

The creation of this sugarplum fairy vision of what a city looks like or can look like is an unnecessary, and I think, slightly insulting view of human intelligence.

I also dress up as a sexy fairy.

Charm is the true gift of the Fairies.

To portray an iconic character has been brilliant in itself, and to be able to do that on a show like 'Once Upon a Time' enhances that because the show puts a spin on characters and makes them very different and puts core values that are very different that aren't in the original fairy tales a lot of people relate to.

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.

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.

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

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.

I have got a lot of kids who just believe in one another. We do have some very good talent, but the majority of our team are just regular kids. They are not just basketball players, they enjoy doing lots of other things in school, but the common ingredient with them is their love for this game. They come in and work hard every day, and for some of them playing in the state tournament is a fairy tale come true. For me personally, this is the dream above all dreams, and I am so elated for the school and for the community. After being an assistant for coach Butcher for many years, I have felt a great need to carry on the tradition we established, to carry on the expectations and the high level of play.

I don t actually believe that stones turn into fairies, but I did once meet someone who had seen a fairy and heard a knocker.

I have a daughter, Hanna, and I never read fairy tales to her. But I did tell her bedtime tales and made up many tales involving 'Gory the Goblin' and other creatures that I borrowed from the Grimms' tales and other tales I knew.

Growing up, my family was very, very into animals. Animals were treated like other people; they slept in the bed with you. I come from an agrarian background. That's how my family's fairy tales are structured, where animals have a lot of power. It gets into people's psyche.

Getting to wear Chanel is my version of a fairy tale. Not that I would wear it every day - my style is more jeans and T-shirts - but it's kind of fun.

I don't think I've cracked a smile that wide in a couple of weeks. It's been a hard two weeks. Then to be in that situation, it was like a fairy tale.

We studied many different versions of classic fairy tales from different cultures around the world. We took stories like Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood and studied at least five versions of each so the students could compare and contrast them.

Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul.

I think it's a way of throwing fairy dust into the face of critics.

Last few months I've been living with this couple,yeah, you know the kind who buy everything in doubles,I love their love and I am thankful,that someone has actually recieved the prize that was promised,by all those fairy tales that drugged us,but still to me I'm sick lonely, no laurel tree, just green envywill my number come up eventually, like love's some kind of lotterywhere you scratch and see what's underneathIts' sorry, just one cherry, I'll play againget lucky.

Last few months I've been living with this couple, yeah, you know the kind who buy everything in doubles, I love their love and I am thankful, that someone has actually recieved the prize that was promised, by all those fairy tales that drugged us, but still to me I'm sick lonely, no laurel tree, just green envy will my number come up eventually, like love's some kind of lottery where you scratch and see what's underneath Its' sorry, just one cherry, I'll play again get lucky.

I think we live in a world where the middle is accepted as sometimes the best, and I don't agree with that. When I watch a movie or another television show, I want to feel something . . . I would say that every episode is like a Grimm's fairy tale. It has a moral at the end.

I think it's really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' doesn't count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you're young does not count as an exposure to fantasy?

It has a jazzy sound; it's a brighter, more modern fairy tale than a lot of shows we've done.

Last year, as great as it was, it was like a fairy tale season. I think we appreciate this a heck of a lot more than we did the Fiesta Bowl bid last year.

Our team's going to be mainly concentrating on running the bases well and situational hitting. I was just trying to get myself ready to hit and it went out so I was happy with that. It was actually one of the coolest things I've ever done on the field. I grew up coming to this park so it was kind of like a fairy tale.

Start with familiar fairy tales or Bible stories or old folk tales or ancient myths and legends. You can tell them straight, or you can add your own twists. If it's a story kids already know, they'll try to correct you if you stray, but that's part of the fun. You can make each story your own.

My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second.

My parents were working performers, so obviously I saw that there wasn't a lot of fairy tale going on there. It was a precarious world. One that they were deeply committed to and deeply loved, but one that required a lot of hard work.

I think, reading the Grimm's fairy tales, they all have some sort of moral component to them, teaching you a lesson.

It all began with a simple observation: Fairy tales always focus on the princess and the prince. The godmother is usually a stock character, fairly one-dimensional. But what about her journey, her trials and tribulations? After all, fairyhood is essentially a job, like waiting tables, or litigating. What's it really like to be a fairy day in and day out? Since all fairy tales need a spell of some kind and it's all been done before, we tried to find an original approach. It occurred to us that it would be more exciting to engage the audience's imagination throughout the show by having Izzy place the spell on the kingdom and not on the princess. It makes the audience imagine horns and warts and scales of green that aren't really there.