Once upon a time there was a man with no heart. Drifting through black-and-white life, caring naught for those hurt, and never, ever allowing another near enough to hurt him. Until, on the least likely...

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.

Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.

Classic fairy tales do not deny the existence of heartache and sorrow, but they do deny universal defeat.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

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...

Mother didn’t understand that children aren’t frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales.

He was walking into Faerie, in search of a fallen star, with no idea how he would find the star, nor how to keep himself safe and whole as he tried. He looked back and...

Tomorrow, I need you to die.

In fairy tales the evil characters disappear or die, in reality, evil spreads while you wait for your hero on a horse, only to realise the sword to save yourself was always in your hand…

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,...

Are you the same woman I brought here, Sasha? You’re like a kid at Christmastime.”–Monroe”You would be, too, if someone fulfilled your most secret fantasies.”–Sasha

Carelessness was once something to be owned. They wore it around their necks as they joined the springtime breeze while ducking in and out of the forest believing their fairy tale.

Il Principe diede mano alla Principessa perché si alzasse: ella era già abbigliata e con gran magnificenza: ed egli fu abbastanza prudente da farle osservare, che era vestita come la mi’ nonna, e che aveva...

nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.

The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards;...

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...

The End” is just the beginning.

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.

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

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...