I squared my shoulders, trying to ignore the fact that I was standing in the apartment of the sea witch, wearing a fairy-tale prom gown, waiting for the attack of the mermaids.
Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.
It's the problem with fairy tales. From far away, they seem so perfect. But up close, they're just as complicated as real life.
As in most fairy tales, there's a prince and a princess, dragons and some magic, and the feeling it gives you that anything is possible if we could stay this way forever.
Through her the battling man becomes sublime, and fairy tales are spun from gray-maned storms; From moments' tears immortal pearls are formed And dulcet wonders cradle bloody times ("She Rests")
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.
Fairy tales are not real. However, myths are the historical notes of those who were much wiser than ourselves. We therefore have no right to judge legends; lest we dare challenge demigods and angels.
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 wa...
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 plo...
Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.
All the atoms of our bodies will be blown into space in the disintegration of the Solar System, to live on forever as mass or energy. That’s what we should be teaching our children, not fairy tales about angels and seeing grandma in heaven.
I don’t think man was meant to attain happiness so easily. Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.
Loving someone isn’t about fairy tales or control. None of us walk through the world unwounded. Love is simply giving someone a safe space to grow and heal, and that’s how we have to love ourselves as well.
I think often there is no good way out of something. No nice, easy ending or neat resolution, no clear way to set things right. That works in stories, in children's fairy tales, but not in real life. Nothing everything can be fixed. And perhaps not e...
Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.
It dawned on her as she grew older, that fairy tales instilled false hopes in people, and that no white knights existed in this world. The mothers should be well aware of that aspect of reality, so why they fed their daughters with the same crap for ...
Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves.
Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.
For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds...
They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.
O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.
