Fairy Tale Quotes

[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It's like what you might call Goldilocks' dilemma in the old fairy tale. Young men see women as "less than" or "better than," but never their equals. And studies indicate that equality is the best foundation for a healthy relationship. ~ Michael Kimmel

I'm romantically inclined. No human being on Earth is not attracted to other people. There is no fairy tale that they only have eyes for you. You just choose to act on it or not. ~ Ben Folds

Mother didn't understand that children aren't frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales. ~ Kate Morton

Fairy tales only happen in movies.
-George Melies
from The Invention of Hugo Cabret ~ Brian Selznick

If our life is ever really as beautiful as a fairy tale, we shall have to remember that all the beauty of a fairy tale lies in this: that the prince has a wonder which just stops short of being fear. If he is afraid of the giant, there is an end of him; but also if he is not astonished at the giant, there is an end of the fairy tale. The whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder, and haughty enough to defy. ~ G.K. Chesterton

She squinted at his nametag. Her eyes weren't quite working. "What's your name?"
"Stig."
"Stick?" she asked, half ready to believe it.
He shook his head and pointed his long index finger at the name stitched on his uniform. "S-T-I-G. Stig."
Harriet's breath caught. "I can't believe it. I've been looking for you. ~ Kimberly Karalius

There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. ~ Diane Arbus

In a cottage deep in the forest lived the wicked old witch ... it was a cottage out of the nastier kind of fairy tale ~ Terry Pratchett

Although reality can sometimes corrupt the fairy tale and alter our ambitions, some things remain unalterable. From the richest to the poorest, we start and end with family. ~ Michael Robotham

Of course you want to get to know her. But at the same time, you want to feel like you already know her. That you will know her instantly. Such a fairy tale. ~ Rachel Cohn

People like to talk about "Cinderella stories," but Cinderella didn't get her happy ending without lifting a finger. She had to show up at the ball, be charming and smooth, and win over the prince. Of course she had help along the way, but ultimately it was up to her to make the fairy-tale ending happen. ~ Michael Oher

The difference between a fairy tale and a sea tale? A fairy tale starts with "Once upon a time". A sea tale starts with " This ain't no $hit"! ~ Edith Widder

For as long as I remember, you've been my lifeline. Every possible future I've imagined, you've always been in it. Funny how I always imagined happily-ever-afters as if we were living in a fairy tale. ~ Mina Rehman

Cinderella was such a dork. She left behind her glass slipper at the ball and then went right back to her step-monster's house. It seems to me she should have worn the glass slipper always, to make herself easier to find. I always hoped that after the prince found Cinderella and they rode away in their magnificent carriage, after a few miles she turned to him and said, Could you drop me off down the road please? Now that I've finally escaped my life of horrific abuse, I'd like to see something of the world, you know? ... I'll catch back up with you later, Prince, once I've found my own way. ~ Rachel Cohn

Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare ... As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism. ~ Arnaud Desplechin

So while the world thinks of you as a real-life Bruce Wayne with hundreds of millions in the bank and models draped across your arm, you're really Batman, aligned with the Resistance, and you kidnapped me for your own good?"
"Exactly," he said.
"Isn't that what an assassin would say in such circumstances?" She batted her eyelashes. ~ Avery Flynn

I am not the wicked stepmother in this fairy's tale. ~ Barry Webster

Sometimes I think that love is one big fairy tale. I wonder if people who say they are in love, if – really – they've just talked themselves into it. They want it so badly, they kind of make it happen. They fake it until they start believing their own story. Maybe that's just sour grapes or something. Maybe because it doesn't happen to me, I don't want to think it happens to anyone else. ~ Elizabeth Chandler

To me, a fairy tale seems to have become reality. ~ Nelly Sachs

Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy tale. ~ Lewis Carroll

Once upon a time, he might've chased her and tumbled her in the sheets with the promise of more in the future. ~ Katherine McIntyre

To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal. ~ W. H. Auden

And you are a useless princess who knows absolutely nothing of the real world. You would be the very last person I'd choose to chain myself to. But apparently both our kingdoms - no. The whole realm needs this alliance, so what we want doesn't matter. I will do what I have to do, regardless of my personal feelings, and you will do the same. So sit down, grow up, and start acting like the kind of princess your people deserve." He snapped off the last syllable and abruptly let go at the same time so that I stumbled backward. ~ Betsy Schow

I do the same with my books ... Nothing like a good argument in the margins with someone who's already said all they have to say on the subject. ~ Betsy Cornwell

N equally basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite ... ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

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

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. ~ Joni Mitchell

Yeah, but what we need are some fighters who know how to take down a wolf. I know three."

"If you are going to get the Pigs, you'll need backup. They're not to be trifled with. ~ K.M. Randall

I never quite understood why Disney hadn't made a sincere fairy tale since 'Beauty and the Beast.' ~ John Lasseter

Twenty-five minutes ago, I was blissfully invisible. No laughing. No evil grins. No drama. And now? It couldn't be more dramatic. I've got a stepsister masquerading as Cinderella, the chauvinistic villagers think I'm the ugly stepsister, and the boy coming to my side is more likely to snag a prince than I am. ~ Kelsey Macke

He reads histories and mythologies and fairy tales, wondering why it seems that only girls are ever swept away from their mundane lives on farms by knights or princes or wolves. It strikes him as unfair to not have the same fanciful opportunity himself. And he is not in the position to do any rescuing of his own. ~ Erin Morgenstern

I like Cinderella, I really do. She has a good work ethic. I appreciate a good, hard-working gal. And she likes shoes. The fairy tale is all about the shoe at the end, and I'm a big shoe girl. ~ Amy Adams

To many, I was myth incarnate, the embodiment of a most superb legend, a fairy tale. Some considered me a monster, a mutation. To my great misfortune, I was once mistaken for an angel. To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost. But I knew the truth - deep down, I always did.
I was just a girl. ~ Leslye Walton

We no longer believe in fairy tales. But we will learn to believe in monsters ~ Francesca Lia Block

Men often told a fairy tale in which there was a division of labor in families, the man going out to earn money, the woman looking after home and children. Reality was different. ~ Ken Follett

There was a place in childhood that I remember well, And there a voice of sweetest tone bright fairy tales did tell. ~ Samuel Lover

My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life. ~ Max Beckmann

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. ~ Neil Jordan

Angels do not whisper in our ears. Predestination is a fairy tale, a bedtime story for adults scared of meaningless death. ~ Paul Doiron

ABOUT SENTIMENTALITY IN LITERATURE:
"Sentimental fiction is a kind of pablum: Excessive amounts can spoil the appetite for reality, or at least for more fibrous forms of art. One reason, surely, why readers throw down books when they don't contain sufficiently "likable" characters is that their tolerance for any sort of moral challenge - for being asked, say, to sympathize with homeless little boys who are godless and truculent and a bit smelling - has been eroded by too many fairy tales masquerading as adult literature."~ wrote Zoe Heller for Bookends in the Sunday's NY Times Book Review interview ~ Alice Simpson

The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale? ~ C.S. Lewis

The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself
his clothes, his manner, his carriage
as a grand joke.
There was a dull pain in his wrists and his feet, and he was finding it harder and harder to breathe. There was nothing more to be gained by feigning unconsciousness, and he raised his head, as best he could, and spat a gob of scarlet blood into Mr. Vandemar's face.
It was a brave thing to do, he thought. And a stupid one. Perhaps they would have let him die quietly, if he had not done that. Now, he had no doubt, they would hurt him more.
And perhaps his death would come the quicker for it. ~ Neil Gaiman

Do I look like a freaking fairy - tale princess to you? ~ Cara Lynn Shultz

unbelievable fairy tale ever. And now, people read those BDSM books like they're going out of style because it makes them wet. That sure as fuck doesn't make it a good novel. A porno movie will make them wet too, but it sure doesn't mean it's a good movie. I fucking swear," he said. ~ Scott Hildreth

Are ya tryin' to kill me, Maggie?" Declan bit the words out and his fingers dug deeper into her hips. "Are ya wantin' to see a grown man beg? ~ Sara Humphreys

Speaking of novels,' I said, 'you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described - by Cocteau, I think - as "a mirage of suspended gardens," and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but - and now let me finish sweetly - we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking "human interest": it is there, it is there - maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy-tale! ~ Zadie Smith

Every fairy tale needs a Villain. ~ Anonymous

I'm Detective Piper of the Fairyland Metro Police, and I've been called in to investigate the incident of the missing frog prince ... ~ A.F. Stewart

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

It was more than that, he said, looking down briefly at her. Love fades when you die. I am clearly dead, but my love for her hasn't diminished. It still burns inside me like a flicker in a flame. ~ Rachel M. Greenebaum

[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man ... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. ~ Joseph Campbell

In fairy tales, the children are saved by caring adults. We need more caring adults in the lives of our children. ~ Donna Shalala

Everything is always my fault. I touch things and they crumple into shit, like the opposite of King Midas and his gold finger. If I was in a fairy tale, I would be called "PooFinger", and everyone would shun me and make me go live in some naff shack under a bridge, telling scary stories to all the children in the kingdom about the wench who turns everything to shit, just by touching it. ~ Holly Bourne

I was his "little girl with the William Burroughs mind," his "secret fairy," "female Frank Zappa" and "window onto a magical world." He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams. ~ Jalina Mhyana

Beauty in life and fiction is a mixture of Fairy Tale and Tragedy. Men see a pretty face and want to claim the image to fit their fantasy. When the fantasy fades away as it always does, the tragedy is that the 'real' woman he did not notice is left standing to face his disillusion and disappointment. ~ Lori Jones

Fairy tales to me are never happy, sweet stories. They're moral stories about overcoming the dark side and the bad. ~ Joe Wright

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.
To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed.
This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman. ~ Angela Carter

In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse. ~ Andrew Ross Sorkin

But clouds bellied out in the sultry heat, the sky cracked open with a crimson gash, spewed flame-and the ancient forest began to smoke. By morning there was a mass of booming, fiery tongues, a hissing, crashing, howling all around, half the sky black with smoke, and the bloodied sun just barely visible.

And what can little men do with their spades, ditches, and pails? The forest is no more, it was devoured by fire: stumps and ash. Perhaps illimitable fields will be plowed here one day, perhaps some new, unheard-of wheat will ripen here and men from Arkansas with shaven faces will weigh in their palms the heavy golden grain. Or perhaps a city will grow up-alive with ringing sound and motion, all stone and crystal and iron-and winged men will come here flying over seas and mountains from all ends of the world. But never again the forest, never again the blue winter silence and the golden silence of summer. And only the tellers of tales will speak in many-colored patterned words about what had been, about wolves and bears and stately green-coated century-old grandfathers, about old Russia; they will speak about all this to us who have seen it with our own eyes ten years - a hundred years! - ago, and to those others, the winged ones, who will come in a hundred years to listen and to marvel at it all as at a fairy tale. ("In Old Russia") ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

That means life itself is a fairy tale. Like the characters, we all live and love and search for a happily-ever-after. ~ Gena Showalter

Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it'll be told for a thousand years.
"But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none."
That's why people invent fights. That's why we're drawn to sports. That's why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal.
We're trying to make our life into a fairy tale. ~ Derek Sivers

Perhaps I shall be obliged, in order not to peter out, to invent another fairy-tale, yet another, with heads, trunks, arms, legs and all that follows, let loose in the changeless round of imperfect shadow and dubious light. ~ Samuel Beckett

…near them grow dreamlike fairy-tale flowers whose leaves stir in the moonlight. ~ Heinrich Heine

I no longer believe love works like a fairy tale but like farming. Most of it is just getting up early and tilling the soil and then praying for rain. But if we do the work, we just might wake up one day to find an endless field of crops rolling into the horizon. In my opinion, that's even better than a miracle. I'd rather earn the money than win the lottery because there's no joy in a reward unless it comes at the end of a story. ~ Donald Miller

Another notable difference between these
fables and their Muggle counterparts is that
Beedle's witches are much more active in seeking their fortunes than our fairy-tale heroines. Asha, Altheda, Amata and Babbitty Rabbitty are all witches who take their fate into their own hands, rather than taking a prolonged nap or waiting for someone to return a lost shoe. ~ J.K. Rowling

life wasn't a fairy tale and there were instances when one couldn't have everything one wanted, not at the same time. As ~ Kate Morton

I want to believe in the fairy tale. ~ Monica Murphy

This book is a fairy tale in which I am the prince and the princess. I am the king and the queen. I am my own wicked witch and fairy godmother. This book is a fairy tale in which I'm cursed and blessed by others. But, finally, I am the fair y finding my own magic. ~ Dean Atta

Armchair warriors often fail - and we've been poisoned by these fairy tales ~ Don Henley

Your little eco-friendly fairy tale ain't going to happen. This was farming land long before it was cute-house land. ~ Christopher Bollen

The fireplace is warm nook Penina Mezei's house in fairy tale in which the "fairy-tale-in Jukebox" can listen to while in the "fairy library" books are fairy tales and books of fairy tales, but also some fairy-tale subject. ~ Penina Mezei

Then I shall bid thee goodnight, my dear. Sweet pixies watch over the dusty moonlight of your dreams, Jessameine. ~ Jennifer Silverwood

Rage Against the Dying Light is my fairy tale, even though it is based on a true story. For everyone knows that fairy tales are not just fantasy. They are the inspiration that feeds our own courage and makes our dreams come true. ~ Jan Surasky

I'm so excited to see 'Horns' because it's so many different genres in one film. It's a sci-fi, it's a love story, it's a horror movie, it's a fairy tale. ~ Juno Temple

We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it. We were children loving our children. And that's who we are still. ~ Marlena De Blasi

Almost every single commercial on television for shampoo, sports shoes, drinks, food, clothes, perfume, cars, etc., is a short fairy tale, for they are given magical qualities. ~ Jack Zipes

Grief is not something you know if you grow up wearing feathers with a Charlie Chaplin boyfriend, a love-child papoose, a witch baby, a Dirk and a Duck, a Slinkster Dog, and a movie to dance in. You can feel sad and worse when your dad moves to another city, when an old lady dies, or when your boyfriend goes away. But grief is different. Weetzie's heart cringed in her like a dying animal. It was as if someone had stuck a needle full of poison into her heart. She moved like a sleepwalker. She was the girl in the fairy tale sleeping in a prison of thorns and roses. ~ Francesca Lia Block

At least that left hope for him. Except "Beauty and the Geek" wasn't exactly the proper translation of the popular fairy tale. ~ Kelly Moran

[Veda:] Twenty years of thinking that vampires and witches and all things supernatural were nothing but a bedtime story: a myth, thought up by ignorant people and told to children to keep them from straying after dark. Now, when it was right in front of her, it still felt like a fairy tale. ~ Jessica Lave

The fairy tale was back on. Prince returned, bad spell broken. I wasn't sure exactly what to do about the leftover, unresolved character. Where was his happily ever after? ~ Stephenie Meyer

Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Snow White has always been one of my favorite fairy tales growing up. To be able to say, "I'm going to be Snow White" - it's crazy. It's an honor. ~ Lily Collins

My parents told me any and every fairy-tale from all around the world. I usually gravitated towards ones with interesting, strong heroines. ~ Sarah J. Maas

You don't get it. They gave me beauty and song, and then I was left in the woods to grow up for sixteen years before being handed over to you. I don't know anything about ruling. I don't even really know what taxes are. I was in the woods in the real world. In the dreamworld, I hid like a mouse and then organized balls and parties. ~ Liz Braswell

And really, really, when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that's where we live, Percy. ~ Catherynne M Valente

There are some things even magic can't fix. ~ Chris Pavesic

She had a destiny, and it was wonderful, every girl's dream. Like Sleeping Beauty, awoken from a deep sleep by a charming vampire, Lena would have her very own fairy tale. ~ Amber Belldene

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

She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It's that kind of story. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
into a spirit world
speaking with the gift of tongues. ~ Anne Sexton

In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact! ~ Ron Carlson

You know, I once had a little boy in Hiddleston come up to me and ask if I conjured up the hartsstone."
"What did you tell him?" he asked.
She spoke in her scratchy, witchy voice, "Why of course I do. Every full moon, my boy. And the wolves howl. And the fairies rise from their bowers, then we dance in a round, breathing in the powerful magic of the hartstone. ~ Juliette Cross

It was not once upon a time, but a certain time in history, before anyone knew what was happening, that Walt Disney cast a spell on the fairy tale, and he has held it captive ever since. ~ Jack Zipes

There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I've already chosen. And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the hand, leading me along unfathomed paths. Either way, the end result is this author's fairytale. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Yule - Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner - of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner. ~ Marianne Moore

If this were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the fishboy appears and Diana shoots him through the heart. Because he is a tragic hero, he's our fucking Gatsby, and he lived for his fish and he has to die for his fish. He would never let my fake authority, condoning his abandonment, making up rules about what's okay just to save his life, convince him to give up his family. He would never leave.
He would know that without him, none of us will be as good. Me, without a friend; and the fish, without a brother; and the island, without a story; and Diana, without her something real, we will all be a little bit less than we were before we knew him.
So he wouldn't leave. Not until I could come with him. And I have never been less able to leave than I am now.
But this isn't a fairy tale, and he doesn't appear. We stand here for a long time.
He really left.
Because it was all that we could do. ~ Hannah Moskowitz

The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her - she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don't. ~ Alice Hoffman

I thought your life was like this because you were new, but it's always gonna be like this, isn't it? You'll always have to answer to people."
"So it would seem," I agreed. "Life isn't a fairy tale,Duncan."
"And you know what they say," Willa chimed in. "Mo' money, mo' problems."
"Well,that was embarrassing to hear you say that, so I'm good. ~ Amanda Hocking