Nursery Tales Quotes

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 finally, I've always drawn a great deal of moral comfort from Humpty Dumpty. The part I like the best? 'All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.' That's because there is no Humpty Dumpty, and there is no God. None, not one, no God, never was. ~ George Carlin

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other
the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It was one of those scenes of life and animation, caught in its very brightest and freshest moments, which can scarcely fail to please; for if the eye be tired of show and glare, or the ear be weary with a ceaseless round of noise, the one may repose, turn almost where it will, on eager, happy, and expectant faces, and the other deaden all consciousness of more annoying sounds in those of mirth and exhilaration. Even the sunburnt faces of gypsy children, half naked though they be, suggest a drop of comfort. It is a pleasant thing to see that the sun has been there; to know that the air and light are on them every day; to feel that they are children, and lead children's lives; that if their pillows be damp, it is with the dews of Heaven, and not with tears; that the limbs of their girls are free, and that they are not crippled by distortions, imposing an unnatural and horrible penance upon their sex; that their lives are spent, from day to day, at least among the waving trees, and not in the midst of dreadful engines which make young children old before they know what childhood is, and give them the exhaustion and infirmity of age, without, like age, the privilege to die. God send that old nursery tales were true, and that gypsies stole such children by the score! ~ Charles Dickens

I wish with all my soul I had been better guided! I wish with all my soul I could guide myself better! […]I have been a nightmare to myself, just now - must have had one, I think. At odd dull times, nursery tales come up into the memory, unrecognized for what they are. I believe I have been confounding myself with the bad boy who "didn't care", and became food for lions - a grander kind of going to the dogs, I suppose. What old women call the horrors, have been creeping over me from head to foot. I have been afraid of myself. ~ Charles Dickens

Henry by the compulsion of love had cheated her of her chosen life, yet he had given her another life, an ample life, a life in touch with the greater world, if that took her fancy; or a life, alternatively, pressed close up against her own nursery. For a life of her own, he had substituted his life with its interests, or the lives of her children with their potentialities. He assumed that she might sink herself in either, if not both, with equal joy. It had never occurred to him that she might prefer simply to be herself. ~ Vita Sackville-West

It's a fine wake I'll be wanting, with the best if everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great days. ~ Neil Gaiman

He wasn't having me try on a glass slipper, but for some strange reason, I finally understood exactly why Cinderella ran off with the prince after having only known him for one night. Having a hot guy kneeling in front of you is sort of intoxicating. ~ Sariah Wilson

Richard Gavin is one of the bright new stars in contemporary weird fiction. His richly textured style, deft character portrayal, and powerful horrific conceptions make every one of his tales a pleasure to read. ~ S.T. Joshi

The walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling. Stacks of books stood neatly arranged on every horizontal surface - tables, windowsills, even the top of an unplugged television. Since Sophie had been forbidden to explore the library at home, her only real experience with books had come at school and from the few children's books that lay on the bottom shelf of a cabinet in the nursery. She sensed immediately that this was something altogether different. It was a library, yes, but she knew these books had been read. They weren't arranged in long lines of matching bindings like the ones in Bayfield House, and almost every volume had slips of paper protruding from the top. she wondered if Uncle Bertram had marked all the best bits.

"Shall we have a story?" said her uncle, when he had hung up their coats.

"Yes, please," said Sophie.

"What would you like?" he asked.

"You pick."

And so he did. They settled onto the couch, Bertram with a cup of tea and Sophie with a mug of cocoa. He began to read and Sophie's world was transformed - this was not like the insubstantial children's stories her mother read to her at bedtime. This was ever so much more.

"The Wind in the Willows," read Uncle Bertram. "Chapter One, The River Bank. The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home." Sophie closed her eyes and fell into the story. ~ Charlie Lovett

But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? How has it happened that all the fine arts, architecture, painting, sculpture, statuary, music, poetry, and oratory, have been prostituted, from the creation of the world, to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?
[Letter to judge F.A. Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816.] ~ John Adams

I think it's really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' doesn't count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you're young does not count as an exposure to fantasy? ~ Robin Hobb

For she was really too lovely
too formidably lovely. I was used by now to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and spirits hang like a rosy veil over commonplace features, an average outline and a pointless merriment. But this was something calculated, accomplished, finished
and just a little worn. It frightened me with my first glimpse of the infinity of beauty and the multiplicity of her pit-falls. What! There were women who need not fear crow's-feet, were more beautiful for being pale, could let a silver hair or two show among the dark, and their eyes brood inwardly while they smiled and chatted? but then no young man was safe for a moment! But then the world I had hitherto known had been only a warm pink nursery, while this new one was a place of darkness, perils and enchantments ... ~ Edith Wharton

Once upon a time, I was a little girl sick in the hospital, and my mother gave me a copy of 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' to comfort me. ~ Kate Forsyth

Most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually happened, than in what it meant. It would have been perfectly normal, indeed expected, for a writer in the ancient world, to tell tales of gods and heroes, whose fundamental facts would have been recognized as false, but whose underlying message would have been seen as true. ~ Reza Aslan

Rumour was the messenger
Of defamation, and so swift, that none
Could be the first to tell an evil tale. ~ Robert Pollok

Out of this city marched armies that seemed to be great, and afterwards were when glory had magnified them.
As the years went by, an occasional soldier returned, and with a foreign trace to his speech, told tales of what had happened to him in places called Ituzaingo or Ayacucho.
These things, now, are as if they had never been.
Martin Fierro ~ Jorge Luis Borges

No wonder princesses were so impotent in fairy tales, she thought. If all they could do was smile, stand straight, and speak to squirrels, then what choice did they have but to wait for a boy to rescue them? Princess ~ Soman Chainani

The wood echoed to the hoarse ringing of other saws; somewhere, very far away, a nightingale was trying out its voice, and at longer intervals a blackbird whistled as if blowing dust out of a flute. Even the engine steam rose into the sky warbling like milk boiling up on a nursery alchohol stove. ~ Boris Pasternak

All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Each night I am nailed into place
and forget who I am.
Daddy?
That's another kind of prison.
It's not the prince at all,
but my father
drunkeningly bends over my bed,
circling the abyss like a shark,
my father thick upon me
like some sleeping jellyfish.
What voyage is this, little girl?
This coming out of prison?
God help -
this life after death? ~ Anne Sexton

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

My roses grew wild and died as I busied myself with feeding and diapering, nursery rhymes and sickbeds.......the best times of my life, the times that passed by me the most quickly, were the times when the roses grew wild ~ Lisa Wingate

[referencing that what bothered her about Hansel and Gretel was the weak willed father who let the evil stepmother send the children into the woods not once but twice, and the unease of children reunited happily with their father] : In many ways that unease has guided me through these stories, that note of trouble that I think many of us hear in familiar tales, because we know - even as children - that impossible tasks are an odd way to choose a spouse, that predators come in many guises, that a prince's whims are often cruel. The more I listened to that note of warning, the more inspiration I found. ~ Leigh Bardugo

If I had been born in the 1700's, presumably children had a bigger vocabulary than I had which means I wouldn't have been able to recite fairy tales to kids because I'm not smart enough.

You know…?

I'd have to be like…..uh:
In time passed, though not long ago, there lived three pigs in stature, little in number, three, who being of an age both entitled and inspired to seek their fortune did set about to do thusly.
When they had traveled a distance, pig numbered first spake saying, "Harken Brethren, head this impetuous realm! Tarry me far from hearth and home I fear we shall fair *snort* not well!" And so being collectively agreed, but individually impaled, the diminutive swine sought each to erect himself an abode..... ~ John Branyan

Far beneath the surface of the earth, hidden from the sun and the moon, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories. Stories written in books and sealed in jars and painted on walls. Odes inscribed onto skin and pressed into rose petals. Tales laid in tiles upon the floors, bits of plot worn away by passing feet. Legends carved in crystal and hung from chandeliers. Stories catalogued and cared for and revered. Old stories preserved while new stories spring up around them. ~ Erin Morgenstern

We said 'pretty women in the sea,' and that was good enough, because who doesn't want there to be pretty women in the sea? We turned monsters into myths, and then we turned them into fairy tales. We dismissed the bad parts. We were too interested in…in…in pretty women in the sea. ~ Mira Grant

There is a folk-tale about a shoemaker and his wife who were so poor that they had to send their many children out into the world to make a living. The lads went through many a perilous adventure but came home in the end, unscathed, to help their mother. They had always remembered their mother's advice and wise words; they often quoted them when they were in trouble, and in fact they recognized one another by them in foreign lands.
The countless peoples of the world may be looked upon as so many children sent out into the world. They have gone through many adventures and hardships. They have drifted apart and fallen out with one another, on many occasions. They have failed to realize soon enough that they are brothers.
But now it seems that they are beginning to realize this
at least to the extent that they are able to get acquainted with each other's fundamental natures
through their stories and songs. ~ Gyula Illyes

I never grew up reading or fantasizing about fairy tales. I was always too busy, like, outside being a kid. ~ Armie Hammer

We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly. We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside-down on the prairies, our hair wild as spiders' legs, our feet rooted nowhere. We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting. Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemetaries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt. ~ Joy Kogawa

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap. ~ Stephen King

Teaching is a sacred art. This is why the noblest druid is not the one who conjures fires and smoke but the one who brings the news and passes on the histories. The teacher, the bard, the singer of tales is a freer of men's minds and bodies, especially when he roams without allegiance to one chieftain or another. But he is also a danger to the masters if he insists upon telling the truth. The truth will inevitably cause tremors in those who cling to power without honoring justice. ~ Kate Horsley

Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love. ~ Ben Okri

Perhaps I should admit on the title page that this book is "By L. Frank Baum and his correspondents," for I have used many suggestions conveyed to me in letters from children. Once on a time I really imagined myself "an author of fairy tales," but now I am merely an editor or private secretary for a host of youngsters whose ideas I am requested to weave into the thread of my stories...My, what imaginations these children have developed! Sometimes I am fairly astounded by their daring an genius. There will be no lack of fairy-tale authors in the future, I am sure. My readers have told me what to do with Dorothy, and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, and I have obeyed their mandates. They have also given me a variety of subjects to write about in the future: enough, in fact, to keep me busy for some time. I am very proud of this alliance. Children love these stories because children have helped to create them. My readers know what they want and realize I try to please them. The result is satisfactory to the publishers, to me, and (I am quite sure) to the children. I hope, my dears, it will be a long time before we are obliged to dissolve partnership. ~ L. Frank Baum

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

Stuff that's truly off-trail was what appealed to 'Weird Tales' editors. ~ Robert Weinberg

Nevertheless, it bothered Vimes, even though he'd got really good at the noises and would go up against any man in his rendition of the HRUUUGH! But is this a book for a city kid? When would he ever hear these noises? In the city, the only sound those animals would make was "sizzle." But the nursery was full of the conspiracy with bah-lambs and teddy bears and fluffy ducklings everywhere he looked.
One evening, after a trying day, he'd tried the Vimes street version:
Where's my daddy?
Is that my daddy?
He goes "Bugrit! Millennium hand and shrimp!"
He is Foul Ol' Ron!
No, that's not my daddy!
It had been going really well when Vimes heard a meaningful little cough from the doorway, wherein stood Sybil. Next day, Young Sam, with a child's unerring instinct for this sort of thing, said "Buglit!" to Purity. And that, although Sybil never raised the subject even when they were alone, was that. From then on Sam stuck rigidly to the authorized version. ~ Terry Pratchett

Next to a mother she wanted a quiet place where she could be alone when she wanted to be; to listen to the wind telling her strange tales, or hold the big spotted shell that murmured of the sea to her ear, or talk to the roses in the garden. ~ L.M. Montgomery

Monch was on no simple retreat. The journey he had plotted for himself was much longer, and took him many buckets away from Appollon to Angarr's Sorrow, the land of fetid bogs in southeastern Sarthiss. This was a world far away from everything he knew... from everyone he knew. Granted, the list of people he knew was exceptionally short, especially since Monch was horrible with names and only slightly less horrible with faces. Regardless, he did not wish to accidentally advertise his inexperience to anyone he might possibly know, which is why he travelled so far afield.

There were ruins in the swamps, ruins hidden under years of neglect and heavy with decay. Things lurked in those ruins, inhuman beasts with forbidden hungers. He intended to use the dangers of the swamps as the whetstone that would hone his abilities to a razor-keen edge. Monch would test his blade against and come back all the stronger...

...or dead.

No... that wasn't right. Given the fact that he was immortal, death really wasn't an option. So then, he would come back stronger...

...or something something horrible. Monch decided to fill in those particular details later on, when he had time to ponder his autobiography at length. He would tidy up that particular idiom later. ~ D.F. Monk

Shun an inquisitive man, he is invariably a tell-tale. ~ Horace

Never can that be told, for those who saw and lived through it have lost the gift of words and those who are dead can tell no tales. Those were things which are not told, but forgotten. Fore where they not forgotten, how could they ever be repeated? ~ Ivo Andric

One eye-witness reported that:
'...it seems more like the celebration of the orgies of Bacchus, than the memory of a pious saint, from the drunken quarrels and obscenities practised on these occasions. So little is there of devotion, or amendment of life or manners, that these places are frequently chosen for the scenes of pitched battles, fought with cudgels, by parties, not only of parishes, but of counties, set in formal array against each other, to revenge some real or supposed injury, and murders are not an unusual result of these meetings.

It is hard to believe that many of those who took part in the fighting had originally gone in a spirit of pilgrimage to a holy well. But very often the two went together, at least in Ireland, and a seriously intended pilgrimage was often followed by boisterous and aggressive behaviour. Dr. Patrick Logan, who has made a modern study of Irish pilgrimages, commented: 'Pilgrims in any age are not noted for their piety, the Canterbury Tales make that clear, but anyone who has ever gone on a pilgrimage knows it is a memorable and enjoyable experience, something which is part of the nature of man. These days pilgrims may be called tourists. ~ Colin Bord

Many Christians, including BioLogos, like to throw out the "you can't take the Bible literally" argument. They think it is the ultimate zinger that will end any debate in their favor. But if we shouldn't take the Bible literally, why should we believe God is real in the literal sense? Perhaps God is a metaphor also. Maybe God is really a metaphor for nature or chance. Heaven forbid! However, BioLogos insists on having it both ways: God is literally true but the Bible is not. That's like saying Mother Goose is literally true but her nursery rhymes are not. ~ G.M. Jackson

How above-the-law children's books are. Hansel and Gretel (littering, breaking and entering), Rumpelstiltskin (forced labor), Snow White (conspiracy to commit murder), Rapunzel (break of contract). ~ Sloane Crosley