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...

…everyone knows that road, the one leading out of town into a deep green expanse of pastures and old farmhouses, which at first makes it seem like you’re entering a fairy tale, something sweet and...

It is winter now,and the roses are blooming again,their petals bright against the snow.My father died last April;my sisters no longer write,except at the turning of the year,content with their fine housesand their grandchildren.Beast and...

The saddest thing of growing up is people no longer believe in fairy tales.

The world is a fairy tale; we are its guardians.

It doesn’t matter if you’re born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan’s egg!

Inevitably they find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always...

It was our passion for words and our ardent desire to write that drew me and Michael together, and the same that drove us apart.Michael wanted to be a great playwright, like the former master...

Not all who are lost are lost forever.

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

I squared my shoulders, trying to ignore the fact that I was standing in the apartment of the sea witch, wearing a fairy-tale prom gown, waiting for the attack of the mermaids.

In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,’ writes Dante, in The Divine Comedy, beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A journey through the...

He looks up at me with watery eyes and asks, ‘How can you, of all people, say everything will be all right?’ He has a point. I consider my answer. ‘Well, it’s better than saying...

Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made...

Come sit, dear,” the old woman said. “We were just discussing kelpies and changelings.”I turned a delightfully amused face at Ronan, hoping to see him embarrassed to be caught in a world of fantasy, but...

norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist...

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.

Did I ever tell you the difference between a Northern fairy tale and a Southern one?” she asked him, indulging herself and letting her head rest on his shoulder. God, he felt good. Her man....

At least that left hope for him. Except “Beauty and the Geek” wasn’t exactly the proper translation of the popular fairy tale.

I’m not a princess but Ryan is a knight, he just belongs to someone else.

Probably not, but we can pretend.

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).

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...

Are you compensating for something, Monroe?” –Bastian

Being the reader of a dark fairy tale is much like being the hero of one. Our lives are filled with pain, boredom, and fear. We want to venture into the dark wood, to see...

Fairy tales die hard in the minds and hearts of some girls. Quinn

Fairy tales, fantasy, legend and myth…these stories, and their topics, and the symbolism and interpretation of those topics…these things have always held an inexplicable fascination for me,” she writes. “That fascination is at least in...

The fairy tale belongs to the poor…I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity.

They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they...

I turned into Little Red Riding Hood. I made a cake, packed it up and went through the forest until I met the wolves. That’s something the story got wrong, wolves don’t travel solo, they...

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.

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

That’s it? That’s all that happens after you topple from grace? We lose our rubies and rations?” Marshall smirked. “Woe is me.

at the center of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power.

Fear isn’t so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same...

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the...

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

Gardens are made of darkness and light entwined.

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

You’ve honey on your tongue, ma fifille,” Maman once said. “If you’d lived in earlier times, you could have been a troubadour.””…There aren’t any troubadours any more, are there, Maman?” Marie said. “And if there...

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

You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.

Luna had told us not to drop the rose, not to leave the path. But we never dropped the rose – it was on me the whole time – and we didn’t leave the path,...

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...

The Dreamer awakesThe shadow goes byThe tale I have told you,That tale is a lie.But listen to me,Bright maiden, proud youthThe tale is a lie;What it tells is the truth.

I haven’t finished revisiting Sleeping Beauty. As a faerie tale, that one is rife with inherent difficulties. After all, the world doesn’t stop just because one person is asleep.

One evening, after a particularly terrible row, the prince smashed his princess over the head with an old wooden clock and she tumbled to the floor, dead.

Some foolish people must have a tragedy, for they cannot believe in happy endings

She talks like you. It’s not every day you hear a four-year-old say Prince Charming is a douchebag who’s only holding Cinderella back.” “That’s my girl.

And those women were sneaky. They understood that including fantastical elements in their tales- golden eggs, signing harps, talking frogs- worked to mask a deeper purpose….it made the stories look on the surface like ‘a...