Fairy Tales Quotes

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.

~ A.s. Byatt

I don't know these stories as well as they know me, I've discovered.

~ Joan Gould

I’ve never believed in fairy tales. One day, the fairies will tell this story. There will be a valiant prince, a part no doubt played in history by the brave Vartan who journeys to rescue his bride from a dragon. There will be fairies. There will be horse-birds and there will be an enchanted blade. But, I will no doubt be stricken from the tale, a cursed blemish on a shining story. Happy endings don’t always happen in the real world.

~ T.t. Escurel

What Grimm fairy tale featured apiarian morphing humans?

~ Solange Nicole

The fairy tale of film—created with the magic of animation—is the modern equivalent of the great parables of the Middle Ages. Creation is the word. Not adaptation. We can translate the ancient fairy tale into its modern equivalent without losing the lovely patina and savor of its once-upon-a-time quality. We have proved that age-old kind of entertainment based on the classic fairy tale recognizes no young, no old.

~ Walt Disney Company

I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of greatness that never was, is tragedy.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

With a glance back towards the house, he pulled the secret sketches from within. He'd been working at them on and off for a fortnight now, ever since he'd come across Cousin Eliza's fairy tales among Rose's things. Though they were written for children, magical stories of bravery and morality, they had made their way beneath his skin. The characters had seeped inside his mind and come alive, their simple wisdom a balm for his swirling mind, his ugly adult troubles. He had found himself in moments of distraction scribbling lines that had turned themselves into a crone at a spinning wheel, the Fairy Queen with her long thick plait, the Princess bird trapped in her golden cage.

~ Kate Morton

As it so happens, Mr. Jest, I’ve sometimes come to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast…

~ Marissa Meyer

Even when a prohibition in a fairy-story is guessed to be derived from some taboo once practised long ago, it has probably been preserved in the later stages of the tale's history because of the great mythical significance of prohibition. A sense of significance may indeed have lain behind some of the taboos themselves. Thou shalt not - or else thou shalt depart beggared into endless regret. The gentlest 'nursery-tales' know it. Even Peter Rabbit was forbidden a garden, lost his blue coat, and took sick. The Locked Door stands as an eternal Temptation.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

And then they lived happily, and we who hear the story are happier still.

~ Andrew Lang

Then find out what your sword is - find your own advantage - and wear it proudly.

~ Chris Colfer

And the old woman who had been the prince’s nurse became nurse to the prince’s children — at least she was called so; though she was far too old to do anything for them but love them. Yet she still thought that she was useful, and knew that she was happy. And happy, indeed, were the prince and princess, who in due time became king and queen, and lived and ruled long and prosperously.

~ Andrew Lang

Bring a sword to school. Trust me-those girls will leave you alone.

~ Chris Colfer

But after being on the run I've learned a life spent creating enemies isn't worth leading. Having allies is the best advantage in the world.

~ Chris Colfer

You're just so confident and self-sufficient. So many girls - especially in my world - are so insecure and jealous. We rely so much on one another, but we're so mean to each other at the same time. We could use more women like you to look up to.

~ Chris Colfer

All these threads, like the ley-lines he'd read about in his Time-Life history books, converging on the Cicciaro girl, who lay there unaware, a glass-coffined beauty whose kingdom was in ruins.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Disheartened, enraptured, and strangely lightheaded, Grady emerged from the trees and walked back through town to the island bridge, his ankles and hands marked up with thorn scratches.

~ Molly Ringle

No one is too old for fairy tales.

~ Nick Lake

No one, I fancy, would discredit a story that the Archbishop of Canterbury slipped on a banana skin merely because he found that a similar comic mishap had been reported of many people, and especially of elderly gentlemen of dignity.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Don’t look for permanent love. You will be disappointed. It is found only in novels, fairy-tales, and films.

~ Girdhar Joshi

In describing a fairy story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: 'this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty'. But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that begun thus: 'this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy'; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Fairytales work on two levels. On a conscious level, they are stories of true love and triumph and overcoming difficult odds and so are pleasurable to read. But they work on a deeper and symbolic level in that they play out our universal psychological dramas and hidden desires and fears.

~ Kate Forsyth

Perhaps it also demonstrates that any young girl can live quite healthily on coarse bread and clear water – so long as she has fine clothes.

~ Ann Lawrence

…while the outside world was full of danger, I knew my interior. I was certain that I could oust an intruder there.

~ Gail Carson Levine

Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps. Reading them often provides an uneasy sensation—a gnawing familiarity—that comforting yet supernatural awareness of living inside a story.

~ Kate Bernheimer

If you die fighting, I want to die fighting with you.

~ Melanie Dickerson

This is what happens, when things are not quite a fairy tale.You go into the woods to find your story. If you are brave, if you are fortunate, you walk out of them to find your life.

~ Kat Howard

This is the thing about fairy tales: You have to live through them, before you get to happily ever after. That ever after has to be earned, and not everyone makes it that far.

~ Kat Howard

This is overdue. Quite a bit, I'm afraid. I apologize. We moved to Topeka when I was very small, and Mother accidentally packed it up with the linens. I have traveled a long way to return it, and I know the fine must be large, but I have no money. As it is a book of fairy tales, I thought payment of a first-born child would be acceptable. I always loved the library. I'm sure she'll be happy there.

~ Ellen Klages

It's an invention, a fairy tale devoid of any sense, like all the legends in which good spirits and fortune tellers fulfill wishes. Stories like that are made up by poor simpletons, who can't even dream of fulfilling their wishes and desires themselves. I'm pleased you're not one of them, Geralt of Rivia. It makes you closer in spirit to me. If I want something, I don't dream of it—I act. And I always get what I want.

~ Andrzej Sapkowski

She was so lovely, it hurt his chest to gaze at her, especially knowing she was courageous and clever too.

~ Melanie Dickerson

Even in the wood, there was a right road and a wrong one. All the most terrifying fairy tales inevitably began with some foolish innocent (or two) straying from the path. Then anything might happen.

~ Robert Dunbar

The piano—that, too, was an adventure. A little girl tried to learn to play it. Her mother insisted, forced her to sit there and practice. Nothing came of it; stubbornness won out in the end, the stubbornness that protects us from the will of others, that defends our right to live our life the way we want. Even if it means life will turn out worse than anyone planned, will turn into a poor life—but it'll be one's own, however it is, even without music, even without talent.

~ Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

You’re wrong about one thing: fairy-tales do exist. Millions of existing parents read existing fairy-tales every night from existing books to kids who, funnily enough...’‘... exist, yeah, I know. I mean it’s fantasy, not reality.

~ Jonathan Dunne

Fairy godmothers?” said the king dubiously. “We’ll have a time getting that past the court council — and the bishop.

~ Robin Mckinley

ah, life—the thingthat happensto uswhile we’re offsomewhere elseblowing ondandelions& wishingourselves intothe pages ofour favoritefairy tales.

~ Amanda Lovelace

I like stories where women save themselves.

~ Neil Gaiman

Don't ever let anyone tell you that fairy tales aren't real. I drink a potion made from magic beans every day, and it brings me back to life.

~ Nanea Hoffman

Don’t you know that everybody’s got a Fairyland of their own?

~ P.l. Travers

Rebecca, we live in a world where darkness seems, in the minds of many, something banished to the world of fairy tales and superhero movies. How surprising it then becomes—even for those of us who believe otherwise—that it may appear in our own lives, in our own battles. To face an opponent that is more than the average ‘jerk,’ who has made a deadly choice, is, let us admit it, nothing that we expect to experience.

~ Gina Marinello-Sweeney