Adult Fairy Tales Quotes

In England in the 19th century, advances in printing methods, combined with the rise of a prosperous middle class, engendered a booming new industry of books published just for children. Casting about for cheap story material, English publishers laid hands on the subtle, sensual adult fairy tales of the Continental tradition and revised them into simpler stories instilled with Victorian values. Although these simplified versions retained much of the violence of the older stories, elements of sexuality and moral complexity were carefully scrubbed away - along with the fiesty heroines who appeared everywhere in the older tales, tamed now into models of Victorian propiety and passivity. In the 20th century, the Walt Disney Studios watered down the tales further still in popular animated films like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, continuing the trend of turning active heroines into powerless damsels in distress. Walt Disney considered even the Victorian versions of the tales too dark for 20th century audiences. "It's just that people now don't want fairy stories the way they were written," Disney commented. "They were too rough." ~ Terri Windling

What Hans had intended to end at a simple kiss quickly escalated into something neither one of them seemed able to stop. ~ Nicki Elson

He met each newly exposed piece of flesh with a tender kiss, remembering how he'd dreamed of doing exactly this on the very first night he'd seen her. ~ Nicki Elson

She sat on her porch those first nights, wrapped in the brackish tidal air. The future's breeze split across her face and joined up again behind her. She felt herself a spinster whose sudden new suitor must be either sadistic, blind, or a confused fortune hunter. She'd read all the cautionary fairy tales and knew the one inevitable outcome. Still, she consented to this courtship, and even decided to court it back. ~ Richard Powers

Aging and the prospect of dying by no means enhance the attractiveness of fictitious comforts to come in paradise, or the veracity of malicious myths about hellfire and damnation. Fear and feeblemindedness cannot be credibly pressed into service to support fantastic claims about the cosmos and our ultimate destiny.

Whether one would even consider turning to religion in advanced years has much to do with upbringing, which makes all the more important standing up to the presumptions of the religious in front of children. One would regard the Biblical events – a spontaneously igniting bush, a sea's parting, human parthenogenesis, a resurrected prophet and so on – that supposedly heralded God's intervention in our affairs as the stuff of fairy tales were it not for the credibility we unwittingly lend them by keeping quiet out of mistaken notions of propriety. ~ Jeffrey Tayler

My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see. ~ Gunter Grass

He looked like a thing broken loose from a bedtime story, something unreal ... The giant watched her from above with a bizarre contemplation, his head tilted acrook, as if he'd snared some exquisite fairy from a storybook tale his own. ~ R.J. Lawrence

For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table. ~ C.S. Lewis

I didn't believe you when you said there was a red statue that read "LOVE," with the LO stacked on top of the VE. LO VE It sounded like something out of one of the old fairy tales you used to tell me when I was a little girl. I thought you were kidding when you said people in the past believed in love so much that they made statues to celebrate it, so they wouldn't forget to LOVE ... well, that seemed kind of ridiculous - but when we dove down and you shined the thermal lantern, and it turned out to be true, I felt like there were so many possibilities in the world - like I'm only beginning to discover what's achievable. Maybe I will find a pure love - like what you and Mom have. ~ Matthew Quick

When does real love begin?
At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity.
At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?
At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession. ~ Anais Nin

Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. ~ Duane Gish

Fairy tales are much more than silly bedtime stories," the teacher continued. "The solution to almost every problem imaginable can be found in the outcome of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are life lessons disguised with colorful characters and situations. "'The ~ Chris Colfer

I'm not born again, I'm not Kabbalah, God forbid, but I did have an experience hitting 30 that I needed to lean on something that assured me that everything is going to be okay. I had to regain a lot of my belief in fairy tales, in happy endings. ~ Rufus Wainwright

Drugs are not the way to the light. They won't lead to a fairy-tale life, they lead to suffering. ~ Layne Staley

Only a fairy tale calls a constant condition 'happiness'. ~ Jacob Burckhardt

We get divorce, we get conned, someone we love dies, or we can't find anybody to love us or somebody breaks our heart and we realize this fairy tale ain't fair. So we suffer. ~ Terry McMillan

Clichés are relatives of the fairy tale, and tropes aren't bad; they go with the territory. ~ Seanan McGuire

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

In fairy tales, love strikes like lightning. In real life, lightning burns. It can even kill you. ~ Neil Strauss

Fairy tales weren't made of common sense and logic - they were leaps of faith. ~ Heather Long

Come sit, dear," the old woman said. "We were just discussing kelpies and changelings."

I turned a delightfully amused face at Ronan, hoping to see him embarrassed to be caught in a world of fantasy, but his face was impassive, completely unperturbed. Those were the hardest boys to ignore: the ones that weren't concerned with your opinion of them, not afraid to be caught listening to fairytales. ~ Annie Cosby

People tend to think of fairy tales as 'archetypal.' They are also extremely sensual, something which translates well over the ages. ~ Kate Bernheimer

The idea of my life as a fairy tale is itself a fairy tale, ~ Grace Kelly

The happily ever after thing. It's great when she marries the prince or whatever and they say that. But they just don't show the part where there's a revolution and they drag her to the guillotine. ~ Mark D. Diehl

I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them. ~ Alice Hoffman

I just read anything I could find. Fairy tales and mysteries and history and poetry. It didn't matter what it was. I would read it over and over and over again. The books, they helped keep me from losing my mind all together. ~ Tahereh Mafi

I cannot imagine a life without books.
Without Father's stories of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses, without pirate stories and fairy tales and poems. Without the hope of another way, of freedom and adventure beyond what we have here and now. How dark life would be. ~ Jessica Spotswood

Americans live not by facts, but by a lengthy list of myths. ~ Dave Champion

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

If you like the fairy tales, visit the old towns! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Sometimes I think we can learn everything we need to know about the world when we read fairy tales. Be careful, be fearless, be honest, leave a trail of crumbs to lead you home again. ~ Alice Hoffman

I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.
Then of course the Man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. As obligation to feel can freeze feelings. (from the essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's To Be Said) ~ C.S. Lewis

I think that Shakespeare himself raided fairy tales and chronicle writers, and he always looked to people who worked in the mythic genres, whether it was folk tales or popular novels. ~ Kenneth Branagh

I avoided my eyes while brushing my teeth, then climbed into bed with a copy of _The Blind Assassin_, because if you're not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you're with.
--Melissa Albert, _The Hazel Wood_ ~ Melissa Albert

I'd learned I didn't need kindling - I was kindling. ("Red") ~ Alyxandra Harvey