Clichés are relatives of the fairy tale, and tropes aren’t bad; they go with the territory.

Everyone thinks of them in terms of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and forgets that they represent girls who walked into dark forests and remade them into their own reflections.

a gang of unpredictable ruffians by day who turned to enthralling storytellers after dark. “I would sometimes join them, and listen for a great part of the night to some of the finest fairy tales and most romantic legends it has ever been my fortune to hear.

Probably not, but we can pretend.

Tomorrow, I need you to die.

Stand still while I yell at you.

Maybe love after all only exists in wonderful fairy tales. I’m just slowly starting to think that,but could I be wrong?

The whole school is on these. We’ve had them for awhile now.

Did you recently turn into a jerk or have you been one since birth?

The combination of razor-sharp wit (completely real) and his credentials (completely fake) had won them over in the end.

The last declaration he’d made to me hung between us. The L word. The one that had nothing to do with like.

Matt was almost completely naked. A tattered loincloth and an ugly chain with a yellow diamond were his only apparel.

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.

Truly, there is magic in fairytales.For it takes but a simply-uttered ‘Once upon a time…’ to allure and spellbind an audience.

Snow came back, but she didn’t come back right.

One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, “The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal.” Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is...

Birthdays were wretched, delicious things when you lived in Beau Rivage. The clock stuck midnight, and presents gave way to magic.Curses bloomed.Girls bit into sharp apples instead of birthday cake, chocked on the ruby-and-white slivers, and collapsed into enchanted sleep. Unconscious beneath cobweb canopies, frozen in coffins of glass, they waited for their princes to...

There were lots of things in this lifetime that I’d doubted, precious little I’d known for sure. But in that moment, I knew I would save her, or die trying.

Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of...

Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation…just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never...

To most people today, the name Snow White evokes visions of dwarfs whistling as they work, and a wide–eyed, fluttery princess singing, “Some day my prince will come.” (A friend of mine claims this song is responsible for the problems of a whole generation of American women.) Yet the Snow White theme is one of...

Silence is another element we find in classic fairy tales — girls muted by magic or sworn to silence in order to break enchantment. In “The Wild Swans,” a princess is imprisoned by her stepmother, rolled in filth, then banished from home (as her older brothers had been before her). She goes in search of...

Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality — for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.

The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.

Princess, princess, youngest daughter,Open up and let me in!Or else your promise by the waterIsn’t worth a rusty pin.Keep your promise, royal daughter,Open up and let me in!

Trying to pump breath into a fairy tale is as arduous and tragic as ancient Greek theatre.

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....

Mrs. Potts beady black eyes narrowed,”Do you know how many glass slippers I have to stitch when I get home? There’s a Mad Hatter serenading a toaster as we speak. There could be mayhem wreaking havoc all over the love in New Gotham, granted what thankless ingrates you are. But here I am!

I’ve discovered as I’ve grown up that life is far more complicated than you think it is when you’re a kid. It isn’t just a straightforward fairytale.

Seeing the transformation in Aaron made me wonder how it would feel to have someone-even a not-so-nice guy like Aaron- look at me the way he looked at Anjali.

I have always been quite good at falling in love, but I don’t pretend to know anything about literal happily ever afters. 

Do not lose hope – what you seek will be found.

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.

The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to...

The End” is just the beginning.

O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.

We can’t give you any further information,” the fairies replied. “Be satisfied, madam, with the assurance that your daughter will be happy.” She thanked them very much and did not forget to give them many presents. Although the fairies were quite rich, they always liked people to give them something. Throughout the world this custom...

We’re a couple of travelers!” I called up to her. “I’m Briony, and this is Ella!””Grammy said I ought not to talk to strangers!” she called back.”We’re not strangers!” Ella shouted. “We’re with the union!”I cut her a look and mouthed, Union?, which was silly with this other girl out of earshot. Ella shrugged.There was...

There’s a flame of magic inside every stone & every flower, every bird that sings & every frog that croaks. There’s magic in the trees & the hills & the river & the rocks, in the sea & the stars & the wind, a deep, wild magic that’s as old as the world itself. It’s...

But as she continued and finished her tale, I could tell that her heart was elsewhere, and when she excused herself to go to bed, she left without saying good night. After that, the princesses in her stories were always beautiful. Always.

The fairy tale is not the conclusion, but the doorway to a more brilliant reality. Pushed onto a pedestal as the final answer their worth is misshapen and distorted. The world’s story may end with a couple living happily ever after but our life in Christ enables the intimacy of the human relationship to illuminate...

Ah—now you think I have been lying to you, that this is only a story. It has a king in it. And while a story with Death might be true, a story with a king in it is always a fairy tale. But remember, this comes from a time when kings were as common as...

Ultimately, the definition of both the wonder tale and the fairy tale, which derives from it, depends on the manner in which a narrator/author arranges known functions of a tale aesthetically and ideologically to induce wonder and then transmits the tale as a whole according to customary usage of a society in a given historical...

If there is one ‘constant’ in the structure and theme of the wonder tale, it is transformation.

The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.

Not all who are lost are lost forever.

I’m glad she’s so smitten with her new huntsman boyfriend and all, but venison-wurst? Gag me with a harpsichord.

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.

The supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born … by the act of being born, we step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In...

I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.