But she never could keep it straight. All the letters, the acronyms, the codes, the colors, changing like musical chairs, every week, every month. Games demons play. It meant nothing to her, except in a...

… the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can–the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the...

Not gonna happen.” Ari threw a pen at the mirror for emphasis.

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...

The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.

Magic is a naughty beast.

He’s so powerful. Who knows maybe he’s advanced past eating

,Qué quiere decir felices por siempre jamás, después de todo, sino una caída en lo ordinario, en la debilidad humana, acumulando desesperación, una caída de muerte?

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,...

Since there are thousands of fairy tales, one may safely guess that there are probably equal numbers where the courage and determination of females rescue males, and vice versa.

He’s MINE”, I howled. “Mine! And I’m his! You knew this when you slunk into our bed. I told you at the beginning, and I thought you understood, well, you understand now, don’t you?”He had...

Imagine a perfect world

My heart broke a little at her unblemished view of life: She still believed in innocent secrets, the heady rush of a good mystery, and happily ever after… (I wasn’t about to disabuse her of...

The very name of the genre itself – fairy tale – originated during this time, for the French writers coined the term conte de fee during the seventeenth century, and it has stuck to the...

A make believe life doesn’t win friends and influence people. It bores the crap out of those living the dream.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

The extremity of her sensitivityimpressed a richly idle princely family,of her discomfort, bothered as she had to beby the absurd softness of the ample beddings,not to mention the pillow piles aggravatingher much lamented acrophobic dis-ease.[from...

Sure. If she gets mugged, she can just flute them to death.

In England in the 19th century, advances in printing methods, combined with the rise of a prosperous middle class, engendered a booming new industry of books published just for children. Casting about for cheap story...

It is so delightful to teach those one loves!

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...

And I think I decided not to love Charlie because I thought I had to be rescued. For practical reasons but also as a proof of love. It’s better that Charlie and I didn’t make...

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...

You are mine, and I am thine, and no power on earth shall make it otherwise.

Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don’t know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you’ve been told, what the...

Many readers simply can’t stomach fantasy. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty-thewed barbarians with battle axes, seeking the bejeweled Coronet of Obeisance … (But) the best fantasies pull aside the velvet curtain of...

Why did you wear heels? How are you supposed to fight a gargoyle in what you’re wearing?

I will tell you, too, that every fairy tale has a moral. The moral of my story may be that love is a constraint, as strong as any belt. And this is certainly true, which...

The whole tradition of [oral] story telling is endangered by modern technology. Although telling stories is a very fundamental human attribute, to the extent that psychiatry now often treats ‘narrative loss’ — the inability to...

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

Yes sir, the fish was left in place of the crystal ball. It’s been bagged and tagged for analysis.”Great. Now we have another red herring on our hands.

I’m here because all fairy tales take place in the woods, King Cole, even those that don’t.

In answer, the news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen. … Lear goes berserk on a heath but comes out of it for a few brief hours every inch a king. Zaccheus climbs...

The wolf said, “You know, my dear, it isn’t safe for a little girl to walk through these woods alone.” Red Riding Hood said, “I find your sexist remark offensive in the extreme, but I...

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...

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;...

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

Soft sun shone down on a misty cathedral at the opposite end of a football-field length courtyard. The cathedral had a long pointed tower with beautiful rose and ivory stained glass windows. Pink-petal flowers and...

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...

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...

At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts...

I know these are only dreams. I know these days are long past. I wake to a dream in which Hammer’s breath has stopped, and mine with it, and hearts have gone to a quiet...

There once was a woman named Story Easton who couldn’t decide if she should kill herself, or eat a double cheeseburger.

I believe in steel swords, gold coins, and man’s wits. (…) And I believe there once were dragons. I’ve seen their skulls, after all.

The literary fairy tale became an acceptable social symbolic form through which conventionalized motifs, characters, and plots were selected, composed, arranged, and rearranged to comment on the civilizing process and to keep alive the possibility...

Why didn’t my father get to give Mom the fairy tale? Why do most people fail to give each other the fairy tale?

The whole world had changed. Only the fairy tales remained the same.

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

THE UNICORN: The saintly hermit, midway through his prayersstopped suddenly, and raised his eyes to witnessthe unbelievable: for there before him stoodthe legendary creature, startling white, thathad approached, soundlessly, pleading with his eyes.The legs, so...

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,...