Transplanted Tales Quotes

My name is Tess Little. But everyone calls me Red. ~ Kate SeRine

I was hardly a fan of being berated like a child even on a good day, so seeing as how the last few days had pretty much buried the needle on the suckometer, my ability to quietly take my lumps was rapidly evaporating. ~ Kate SeRine

What do you get when you cross an egomaniacal fairy godmother, an arrogant genie, and a couple of wandering plagiarists whose idea of cultural preservation is stealing the stories of unsuspecting villagers and passing them off as their own? ~ Kate SeRine

I'd always imagined that I'd come up with something clever and pithy when it came to my last words, but as I stood there staring at those horrifying green eyes, I settled for a little startled profanity.

How embarrassing. ~ Kate SeRine

The feast was seen everywhere and in everything. Some women in semi-dresses were busy doing many things at once. Domestic animals were crying their last, with knives on their throats. They too were celebrating the feast in their own ways.Pg.93 ~ Obehi Peter Ewanfoh

I got a servant, a nice clean German girl from the Volga. Her village had been devastated - no other word can convey my meaning - by the liquidation of the Kulaks. In the German Volga Republic the peasants, who had been settled there two hundred years before to set an example to the Russians, had been better farmers and so enjoyed a higher standard of life than most peasants in Russia. Consequently, the greater part of them were classified as Kulaks and liquidated.
***
The girls came to the towns to work as servants, and were highly prized, since they were more competent, cleaner, more honest and self-respecting than the Russian peasants. Curiously, they were the most purely Teutonic Germans I had ever seen, Germans like the pictures in Hans Andersen fairy tales, blue-eyed, with long golden plaits and lovely, fair skins. Being Protestants, and regarding the Russians around them as no better than barbarians, they had intermarried little and retained a racial purity which would no doubt have delighted Hitler.
***
My Hilda seemed a treasure. She could cook, she could read and write, she kept herself and the rooms clean and looked like a pink and flaxen doll. I could treat her as an equal without finding that this led to her stealing my clothes and doing no work.
The servant problem in Moscow for Jane and me lay in our inability to bully and curse and drive, which was the only treatment the Russian servant understood. It was quite natural that this should ~ Freda Utley

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

But most dragons seem to have interesting personalities
besides probably having quite good reasons for what they do, if only one could understand them ~ Diana Wynne Jones

Grace is not impassible, or without passions and affections. The stoics held no man a good man but he that had lost all natural feeling and affection. Elijah was a man of like passions. Grace doth not abrogate our affections, but prefer them; it transplanted them out of Egypt that they may grow in Canaan; it doth not destroy nature, but direct it. ~ Thomas Manton

Believing then … that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one's natural pessimism by stoicism and the refusal of illusion, while embellishing the scene with any one of the following. There are the beauties of science and the extraordinary marvels of nature. There is the consolation and irony of philosophy. There are the infinite splendors of literature and poetry, not excluding the liturgical and devotional aspects of these, such as those found in John Donne or George Herbert. There is the grand resource of art and music and architecture, again not excluding those elements that aspire to the sublime. In all of these pursuits, any one of them enough to absorb a lifetime, there may be found a sense of awe and magnificence that does not depend at all on any invocation of the supernatural. Indeed, nobody armed by art and culture and literature and philosophy is likely to be anything but bored and sickened by ghost stories, UFO tales, spiritualist experiences, or babblings from the beyond. ~ Christopher Hitchens

All the ancient classic fairy tales have always been scary and dark. ~ Helena Bonham Carter

People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. ~ Neil Gaiman

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

It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the animal kingdom, and on which each individual of his species must ever again appear as a helpless infant... is a direct fulfilment of all, or of most, of the dearest wishes in his fairy-tales. All these possessions he has acquired through culture. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him - he attributed to these gods. One may say, therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture. Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. But only, it is true, in the way that ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only by halves. Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times... Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man's likeness to a god still more. ~ Sigmund Freud

Approaching Em's cottage, especially at night, always enchanted him. It was like walking into those fairy tales he'd read by flashlight under his bedcovers, full of rose-covered cottages and small stone bridges, glowing hearths and content couples hand in hand. His relieved father had thought he was reading Playboy but instead he was doing something infinitely more pleasurable and dangerous. He was dreaming of the day he'd create this fairy-tale world for himself, and he'd succeeded, at least in part. He had himself become a fairy. And as he looked at Em's cottage, its buttery light beaconing, he knew he'd walked right into the book he'd used to comfort himself when the world seemed cold and hard and unfair. Now he smiled and walked toward the house, carrying his Christmas Eve offering. ~ Louise Penny

Fairy tales are not real. However, myths are the historical notes of those who were much wiser than ourselves. We therefore have no right to judge legends; lest we dare challenge demigods and angels. ~ C. JoyBell C.

The laundry has its hands on my dirty shirts, sheets, towels and tablecloths, and who knows what tales they tell. ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

You can tell a lot about a country by its prisons. In hippy-dippy Socialist Sweden, rapists and murders (all three of them) while away their days making arts and crafts in what are essentially taxpayer-funded mental health clinics. The Swedes' theory seems to be that a) anyone who commits such a crime must be crazy and b) with enough art therapy, the individual in question will soon become just another law-abiding, nude-sunbathing pot-smoker. In America, we think people in prison are either the victims of some terrible government conspiracy, the victims of "society" - whatever that means - or heinous evildoers. And if they are heinous enough, we fry them with electricity, unless of course they find Jesus first. The Swedes, in a nutshell, are tolerant and forgiving, verging on the naïve; Americans are religious and vengeful, suspicious of their government, and suckers for tear-jerking tales of redemption. ~ Maureen Klovers

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

Why should I laugh?' asked the old man. 'Madness in youth is true wisdom. Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it. ~ Andrew Lang

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

Yes, Cinderella won a real prize - a man who couldn't see her true worth until she fitted in the shoe properly. ~ Lily Morton

Fairytales were never really meant for children; they were meant as cautionary tales for teenagers on the verge of growing up. ~ Kate Forsyth

More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves. Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes
or napping, or shopping, or answering emails
to spending time with our kids. (I am very specifically referring here to Kahneman's study of 909 Texas women.) But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one
and nothing
provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it's the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales. ~ Jennifer Senior

Careful the spell you cast, not just on children. Sometimes the spell may last Past what you can see And turn against you ... Careful the tale you tell. That is the spell. ~ Stephen Sondheim

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

My grandmother was born in 1900, and she would regale me with tales I call 'Little House on the Prairie' tales, but they were tales of segregated and racist America growing up in Alabama and Mississippi, where she came from. ~ David Alan Grier

Every interview with a public figure should include the question "What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?" The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility. ~ Stewart Brand

No, the fault lies with the artists," Claire went on. "The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It's them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king. ~ Diana Gabaldon

LEASE
Life Ends And Session Expires
Kamil Ali - Poem, The Balance' - Profound Vers-A-Tales ~ Kamil Ali

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

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee. ~ Robert W. Service

We tell myths over and over again, lest we forget who we are, lest we not understand that these tales take us through the darkness of our lives, and they put us into a place where you understand what it is to be human. ~ Julie Taymor

At the heart of his paper was the notion that fairy tales relieved us of our need for order and allowed us impossible, irrational desires. Magic was real, that was his thesis. This thesis was at the very center of chaos theory - if the tiniest of actions reverberated throughout the universe in invisible and unexpected ways, changing the weather and the climate, then anything was possible. The girl who sleeps for a hundred years does so because of a single choice to thread a needle. The golden ball that falls down the well rattles the world, changing everything. The bird that drops a feather, the butterfly that moves its wings, all of it drifts across the universe, through the woods, to the other side of the mountain. The dust you breathe in was once breathed out. The person you are, the weather around you, all of it a spell you can't understand or explain. ~ Alice Hoffman

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

I just wonder… Isn't it better to start as a monster and become a hero? Isn't that what creates belief? The idea that someone can change? ~ F.D. Lee

Mary Jane Clairmont, the second wife of William Godwin, and Mary Shelley's stepmother, had the idea of bringing out French fairy tales for children in an attempt to make some much needed money for the family (she has not been given her due by biographers, in my view). ~ Marina Warner

Only in cartoons and fairy tales and greeting cards do endings have glitter ~ Holly Goldberg Sloan

The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas. ~ Philippe Grimbert