Arabian Tales Quotes

I took a book - some Arabian tales; I sat down and endeavoured to read. I could make no sense of the subject; my own thoughts swam always between me and the page I had usually found fascinating. ~ Charlotte Bronte

The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian Tales, without the merit of being entertaining, and the account of men living to eight and nine hundred years becomes as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of the Mythology. ~ Thomas Paine

That's the problem with fairy tales, they change with the telling. ~ Melinda Salisbury

He's jealous because lions are better hunters."
Monroe
"Are you compensating for something, Monroe?"
Bastian ~ Bethany Averie

If you want to tell grown-up fairy tales, you have to look for the dark side. ~ Juan Antonio Bayona

The Princess Saralinda thought she saw, as people often think they see, on clear and windless days, the distant shining shores of Ever After. Your guess is quite as good as mine (there are a lot of things that shine) but I have always thought she did, and I will always think so. ~ James Thurber

I grew up on DC Comics, moral tales where the bad guys got their comeuppance. To me the gory panels or grotesque stuff just made me chuckle. ~ George A. Romero

One conversation! One simple, honest, true conversation, and all your questions would be answered, all your problems solved! Really, man, is it that difficult? Then you'd be free to fall into each other's arms and live your Happily Ever After. Why make it so complicated?
Eanrin ~ Anne Elisabeth Stengl

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

As a writer, the ideal job is the one that allows you time and mental space away from it. Teaching seemed to me like the obvious choice - those summers off, you know - but my experience may serve as a cautionary tale. ~ Debra Dean

A riveting, exciting and thoroughly compelling tale of adventure. ~ John Grisham

Prague is far more than the sum of its physical parts or its history. It is a city of the mind and the imagination, a city that exists as vividly in poetry and painting and music and legend as it does in brick and stone... Just as the physical city of Prague would be unimaginable without its unique topography, without its palaces, its churches, its parks, its streets, and its hostelries, so the Prague of the mind would be unimaginable without its storytellers and the tales they weave. ~ Paul Wilson

The term "spirit projection" sprang to mind. Are you familiar with it? Japanese folk tales are full of this sort of thing, where the soul temporarily leaves the body and goes off a great distance to take care of some vital task and then returns to reunite with the body. ~ Haruki Murakami

A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them. Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder. ~ John Dos Passos

Tonight was a perfect illustration of why Cinderella and the Prince get married twenty-four hours after they meet. Because when you're living with your stepmother, there is no happily ever after. ~ Melissa Kantor

Tents are boasters, telling exaggerated tales of the weather they save you from. ~ Mark Lawrence

We tell stories of the dead as a way of making a sense of the living. More than just simple urban legends and campfire tales, ghost stories reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we can't talk about in any other way. The past we're most afraid to speak aloud of in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark. ~ Colin Dickey

Alec answered her, "You do know that it's disturbing that you know all that, right? We thought you were some go-hard; take no prisoners, don't-look-at-me-or-I'll-bust-a-cap-in-your-ass, warrior."

She balled her hands up by her hips and barked in annoyance, "Well I wasn't raised on G.I. Joes, you know! Mama raised me on princesses and fairy tales, I just happened to end up liking the swords better than the shoes in the stories, okay?" ~ Jenna ~ Jessie Lane

So, as much as it is about this continuing war, the reinstated draft, and their individual views, it's really sort of a deeply human tale, and a character study as well. ~ Elijah Wood

Come in, Vasya,' he said. 'It is cold.' Could the snow-laden night speak, it might have spoken with that voice. ~ Katherine Arden

In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. He did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark and there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell. ~ Cormac McCarthy

There is a movement happening, a quiet one.
A low-profile, low-resolution revolution.
Comprised of writers and dreamers, of guerrilla artists and thought-ninjas.
Those with something to say.
They communicate through text inscribed on true public spaces, rather than blogs and forums.
Choosing fewer words, even without being bound by 140 character limits.
Using ink instead of pixels.
Sending messages in living, breathing space.
Pens scream louder into the void.
Even if permanent ink is not aptly named. ~ Erin Morgenstern

others swapped lewd jokes and fictitious tales of several kinds of booty scored. ~ Hugh Howey

You've heard tales of beauty and the beast. How a fair maid falls in love with a monster and sees the beauty of his soul beneath the hideous visage. But you've never heard the tale of the handsome man falling for the monstrous woman and finding joy in her love, because it doesn't happen, not even in a story-teller's tale. ~ Karen Maitland

Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed, and no one drifted out their doors, you could see Mr. K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle. ~ Ray Bradbury

Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, [is] religion; not allowed, superstition. ~ Thomas Hobbes

In Grimm's fairy tales, you kiss a frog and in two seconds, it becomes a prince. That is a fairy tale. In evolution, you kiss a frog and in two million years, it becomes a prince. ~ D. James Kennedy

We all accepted that this land was a gate to that other world, the realm of spirits and dreams and the Fair Folk, without any question. The place we grew up in was so full of magic that it was almost a part of everyday life - not to say you'd meet one of them every time you went out to pick berries, or draw water from your well, but everyone we knew had a friend of a friend who'd strayed too far into the forest, and disappeared; or ventured inside a ring of mushrooms, and gone away for a while, and come back subtly changed. Strange things could happen in those places. Gone for maybe fifty years you could be, and come back still a young girl; or away for no more than an instant by moral reckoning, and return wrinkled and bent with age. These tales fascinated us, but failed to make us careful. If it was going to happen to you, it would happen, whether you liked it or not. ~ Juliet Marillier

The tales are only as dark as the teller. ~ Michael R. Fletcher

That's it? That's all that happens after you topple from grace? We lose our rubies and rations?" Marshall smirked. "Woe is me. ~ Sophie Avett

Today there are no fairy tales for us to believe in, and this is possibly a reason for the universal prevalence of mental crack-up. Yes, if we were childish in the past, I wish we could be children once again. ~ Anita Loos

The religious naturalist is provisioned with tales of natural emergence that are, to my mind, far more magical than traditional miracles. Emergence is inherent in everything that is alive, allowing our yearning for supernatural miracles to be subsumed by our joy in the countless miracles that surround us. ~ Ursula Goodenough

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

From sentence to sentence, in fairy tales there is no reality that is subordinated to any other. Just as, outside the pages there is no reality. ~ Kate Bernheimer

Wolgast recalled when he'd come down here with his friends to buy candy and comic books. Back then, a spinning wire rack had stood by the front door: Tales from the Crypt, Fantastic Four, the Dark Knight series, Wolgast's favorite. ~ Justin Cronin

Many cultural stories worldwide present the domination system as the only human alternative. Fairy tales romanticize the rule of kings and queens over "common people." Classics such as Homers Illiad and Shakespeare's kings trilogy romanticize "Heroic violence." Many religious stories present men's control, even ownership, of women as normal and moral.

These stories came out of the times that oriented much more closely to a "pure" domination system. Along with newer stories that perpetuate these limited beliefs about human nature, they play a major role in how we view our world and how we live in it. But precisely because stories are so important in shaping values, new narratives can help change unhealthy values.

Of particular importance are new stories about human nature. We need new narratives that give us a more complete and accurate picture of who we are and who we can be - stories that show that our enormous capacities for consciousness, creativity and caring are integral to human evolution, that these capacities are what make us distinctively human. ~ Riane Eisler

And what do we do to fit our English-speaking Chinese, our docile and happy, our truly loyal servants, for the Asia of the future? We teach them English history: Henry the VIII, Elizabeth and Victoria, English geography, three-quarters of the book the British Isles, one quarter the rest of the world. literature, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and The Mill on the Floss, all in Basic, as they aren't to know the complexities of our tongue. We cut them from their own learning, their traditions; if that were cutting them off merely from the past, it wouldn't matter, but also and more dangerously, it cuts them from the present, and perhaps the future of Asia. With these happy eunuchs who are bound to us by their knowledge of English we run this country well as our colonial preserve. But we cannot pretend to think we can leave it to them to run it for themselves. All the revolutionaries in India were people who went back to their own literature and language. We'll see the same phenomenon here. ~ Han Suyin

I've long been interested in the tale-within-a-tale phenomenon. I'm familiar with many tales which use this framework or the device of many people in one place, telling their stories, or multiple storytellers commenting on each others' stories with their own. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

What falls on air yet's lighter
than balloon? What betrays time
yet folds into a cut? Who flutters
at the sight of song then bellows
into flight? What height is
halved by precipice, what gorge
dissolved by trill? Who telling
tales upbraids a stump when
prattle veils its want?

Stone breaks it not, nor diamonds,
yet splits with just one word: it's
used for casting devils out; still,
fools obey it first. ~ Charles Bernstein

Bran knew. "She's a child. A child of the forest." He shivered, as much from wonderment as cold. They had fallen into one of Old Nan's tales.
"The First Men named us children," the little woman said. "The giants called us wok dak nag gran, the squirrel people, because we were small and quick and fond of trees, but we are no squirrels, no children. Our name in the True Tongue means those who sing the song of the earth. Before your Old Tongue was ever spoken, we had sun our songs ten thousand years."
Meera said, "You speak the Common Tongue now."
"For him. The Bran boy. I was born in the time of the dragon, and for two hundred years I walked the world of men, to watch and listen and learn. I might be walking still, but my legs were sore and my heart was weary, so I turned my feet for home."
"Two hundred years?" said Meera.
The child smiled. "Men, they are the children. ~ George R R Martin

So when she looked in the mirror one day, and saw the beginning of thorny protrusions on her legs, a slight greenish tinge to her skin, she sighed.

It was inevitable. - The Monster In Her Bedroom, Havok Magazine, Issue 1.1 ~ Katherine Valdez

I was learning the ways of the world; one of them being that the presence of a certain type of curly-haired man - your type - will cause you to fidget and fidget until the only way to reach some level of calm is to touch him. pg.38 ~ Helen Oyeyemi