105 Enchanting Fairy Tale Quotes

Fairy tales have woven their magic through generations, capturing hearts with their timeless themes of courage, love, and adventure. These enchanting stories, filled with mythical creatures and moral lessons, spark the imagination and remind us of the wonder in the world. Whether it's a prince transformed by love's true kiss or a brave heroine breaking free from her confines, the best fairy tale moments are punctuated by quotes that linger in our minds. In this collection, we've gathered 105 of the most enchanting fairy tale quotes to inspire and transport you to far-away lands where anything is possible, and magic is just a turn of the page away.

1. “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.” - Mae West

2. “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.” - Albert Einstein

3. “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” - Neil Gaiman

4. “Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.” - Hans Christian Andersen

5. “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 sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It's just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.” - Alfred Hitchcock

6. “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!” - Charles Lamb

7. “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.” - G.K. Chesterton

8. “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 or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.” - C.S. Lewis

9. “Fairy tales are experienced by their hearers and readers, not as realistic, but as symbolic poetry.” - Max Luthi

10. “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 an eternal perfection. In a balanced perspective, neither denigrated nor exalted from their intended place, fairy tales are a lovely and exhilarating part of life.” - Natalie Nyquist

11. “There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.” - Neil Gaiman

12. “When I was a little girl I used to read fairy tales. In fairy tales you meet Prince Charming and he's everything you ever wanted. In fairy tales the bad guy is very easy to spot. The bad guy is always wearing a black cape so you always know who he is. Then you grow up and you realize that Prince Charming is not as easy to find as you thought. You realize the bad guy is not wearing a black cape and he's not easy to spot; he's really funny, and he makes you laugh, and he has perfect hair.” - Taylor Swift

13. “Can you not see," I said, "that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is—what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is—what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.” - G.K. Chesterton

14. “Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.” - Jack Zipes

15. “It's just that, right now, I want to hear you promise me that if we do run out of time and I go mad, like Miranda, it ends with me. The curse ends here, because our baby will be safe. You will make that happen. Isn't that so?"It took him a minute. "Yes," he said finnally. "It's so. Although, if we're just going to talk about the baby, I can think of an easier way to save her."Oh? What?"I'd just lock her up from her sixteenth birthday on."Lucy didn't laugh. "Don't think I haven't thought of that too, love. but here's the thing. That parents try that in all the fairy tales. It never works.” - Nancy Werlin

16. “There are many kinds of joy, but they all lead to one: the joy to be loved.” - Michael Ende

17. “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. Where her head was meant to lie, right there, on him. "What's the difference?""A Northern one starts 'once upon a time,' while a Southern one starts 'y'all ain't going to believe this shit.” - Erin McCarthy

18. “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 part of what my novels are about.” - Regina Doman

19. “Studies [on the origin of fairy-stories] are, however, scientific (at least in intent); they are the pursuit of folklorists or anthropologists: that is of people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested....with regard to fairy stories, I feel that it is more interesting, and also in its way more difficult, to consider what they are, what they have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them. In Dasent's words I would say: 'We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.'Such stories have now a mythical or total (unanalysable) effect, an effect quite independent of the findings of Comparative Folk-lore, and one which it cannot spoil or explain; they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

20. “Think of every fairy-tale villainess you've ever heard of. Think of the wicked witches, the evil queens, the mad enchantresses. Think of the alluring sirens, the hungry ogresses, the savage she-beasts. Think of them and remember that somewhere, sometime, they've all been real.Mab gave them lessons.” - Jim Butcher

21. “The strong belief can make things out of imagination.But that can also make facts as if they were fairy tales.” - Toba Beta

22. “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 will ignore it because of your traditional status as an outcast from society, the stress of which has caused you to develop your own, entirely valid, worldview. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must be on my way.” - James Finn Garner

23. “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” - G.K. Chesterton

24. “Madame d'Aulnoy is the true mother of the modern fairy tale. She invented the modern Court of Fairyland, with its manners, its fairies, its queens, its amorous, its cruel, its good, its evil, its odious, its friendly fées.” - Andrew Lang

25. “Das pädagogische Bedenken: „Darf man Kinder mit dem Hokuspokus afrikanischer Zauberer und böser Feen unterhalten?“ kommt ungefähr der Frage gleich, ob man den Eskimos ihre Amulette und Zauberpriester weiterhin gestatten soll.Literarisch ließe sich gegen Märchen wie „La Belle au Bois Dormant“, „Le Petit Cahperon Rouge“, „Le Chat Botté“, „Riquet à la Houppé» eigentlich nichts einwenden; waren sie doch von einem Charles Perrault (de l’Academie Francaise) und seiner Geliebten, einer Comtesse d’Aulnay […] in die Aristokratensalons des Louis Quatorze eingeführt worden und hatten sich so manierlich, so chevaleresk aufgeführt, dass sie überall als geistige Sprösslinge ihrer durchaus hoffähigen Editoren empfunden wurden.Ihr plebejischer, ja asiatischer, ja negroider Ursprung wurde erst im XIX. Jahrhundert aufgedeckt, als in Deutschland und Rußland Sprachforscher ihren Stammbäumen nachgingen: als die Rechtsgelehrten Brüder Grimm ihre Erzählungen unverblümt dem Volksmund nachschrieben, um sie „in letzter Minute für die armen und einfachen Leute zu retten, denen man sie vorenthielt…“Aber was da zum Vorschein kam, wuchs den Philologen über den Kopf, wie das so oft im Eifer der Wissenschaften vorkommt. Bei ihrem Vorhaben, im reinsten Interesse der Germanistik heimische Sagenschätze schlichter Bauern und ehrbarer Ammen freizulegen, waren sie auf Aushöhlungen gestoßen, aus denen ihnen geile Succuben entgegenflatterten, giftiges Schlangen- und Basiliskengezücht entgegenkroch, der Blutgeruch shakesperarischer Hexenkessel in die Nase stieg.Auch hatten sie damit, ohne es zu wollen, einer überall gärenden permanenten Verschwörung Vorschub geleistet – nämlich einer der Kinder aller Rassen, aller Zeitläufte, die heimtückisch, mit dem Revanchegelüst zu kurz gekommener Zwerge das abstruse Riesenreich der Erwachsenen unterwühlen.” - Walter Mehring

26. “That's the thing about being the product of happily marries parents, You grow up thinking the fairy tale is real, and more than that, you think you're entitled to live it. So far, though, it wasn't working out as planned.” - Nicholas Sparks

27. “My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man's.” - John Connolly

28. “Thankfully, the farmers understand my request that the children not be allowed to peer through the windows at me.It would be alarming for them to see me with their dolls, to see me using the knife on their faces. There are some things children never should see.” - Kate Bernheimer

29. “But wishes are only granted in fairy tales.” - Simone Elkeles

30. “The lamb baa-ed vigorously as Mary dragged it into the manicure room, and Zel winced. She really should insist Julie come work, She could use the help, plus it would mean extra mother-daughter time--and, Zel thought wryly, I won't have to find a spare tower in the suburbs.Closing the appointment book, Zel went to finish trimming Linda's hair. "Did I hear a sheep out there?" Linda asked."Sick dog," Zel said. "Now, bend your head down." Linda obeyed and Zel ran her fingers through the back of her hair to check for evenness. All she needed to do was think of a way to make Julie come without Julie immediately assuming her mother was trying to ruin her life. Not an easy task.” - Sarah Beth Durst

31. “You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.” - Toba Beta

32. “Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea.” - Oscar Wilde

33. “Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.” - David Hume

34. “The tales of Elfland do not stand or fall on their actuality but on their truthfulness, their speaking to the human condition, the longings we all have for the Faerie Other.” - Jane Yolen

35. “Gaea?” Leo shook his head. “Isn’t that Mother Nature? She’s supposed to have, like, flowers in her hair and birds singing around her and dear and rabbits doing her laundry.”“Leo, that’s Snow White,” Piper said.” - Rick Riordan

36. “It’s just that you go so crazy being alone like that. Sometimes he’d forget my water or food and I’d cry and cry and cry.” She stops talking and looks out the window. “I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up.” - Holly Black

37. “This was like being in one of those National Geographic magazines. We were among the natives now.” - Brandi Salazar

38. “For it is a true fact that faeries, just like people, very often find that a full belly and a good friend are all that they need to be happy.” - C.S. Einfeld

39. “When you enter the woods of a fairy tale and it is night, the trees tower on either side of the path. They loom large because everything in the world of fairy tales is blown out of proportion. If the owl shouts, the otherwise deathly silence magnifies its call. The tasks you are given to do (by the witch, by the stepmother, by the wise old woman) are insurmountable - pull a single hair from the crescent moon bear's throat; separate a bowl's worth of poppy seeds from a pile of dirt. The forest seems endless. But when you do reach the daylight, triumphantly carrying the particular hair or having outwitted the wolf; when the owl is once again a shy bird and the trees only a lush canopy filtering the sun, the world is forever changed for your having seen it otherwise. From now on, when you come upon darkness, you'll know it has dimension. You'll know how closely poppy seeds and dirt resemble each other. The forest will be just another story that has absorbed you, taken you through its paces, and cast you out again to your home with its rattling windows and empty refrigerator - to your meager livelihood, which demands, inevitably, that you write about it.” - Elizabeth J. Andrew

40. “The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.” - Walter Benjamin

41. “What Grimm fairy tale featured apiarian morphing humans?” - Solange nicole

42. “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.” - G.K. Chesterton

43. “My name is Arianna Morganna Brittany DuLac--you can imagine why I went by the name Ryan.” - Priya Ardis

44. “Do I look like I want to be involved in your teen love saga? Ask someone who cares.” - Priya Ardis

45. “He’s so powerful. Who knows maybe he’s advanced past eating” - Priya Ardis

46. “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.” - Erik Christian Haugaard

47. “Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.” - G.K. Chesterton

48. “Why did you wear heels? How are you supposed to fight a gargoyle in what you're wearing?” - Priya Ardis

49. “This is the list you carry in your pocket, of the things you plan to say to Kay, when you find him, if you find him:1. I’m sorry that I forgot to water your ferns while you were away that time.2. When you said that I reminded you of your mother, was that a good thing?3. I never really liked your friends all that much.4. None of my friends ever really liked you.5. Do you remember when the cat ran away, and I cried and cried and made you put up posters, and she never came back? I wasn’t crying because she didn’t come back. I was crying because I’d taken her to the woods, and I was scared she’d come back and tell you what I’d done, but I guess a wolf got her, or something. She never liked me anyway.6. I never liked your mother.7. After you left, I didn’t water your plants on purpose. They’re all dead.8. Goodbye.9. Were you ever really in love with me?10. Was I good in bed, or just average?11. What exactly did you mean, when you said that it was fine that I had put on a little weight, that you thought I was even more beautiful, that I should go ahead and eat as much as I wanted, but when I weighed myself on the bathroom scale, I was exactly the same weight as before, I hadn’t gained a single pound?12. So all those times, I’m being honest here, every single time, and anyway I don’t care if you don’t believe me, I faked every orgasm you ever thought I had. Women can do that, you know. You never made me come, not even once.13. So maybe I’m an idiot, but I used to be in love with you.14. I slept with some guy, I didn’t mean to, it just kind of happened. Is that how it was with you? Not that I’m making any apologies, or that I’d accept yours, I just want to know.15. My feet hurt, and it’s all your fault.16. I mean it this time, goodbye.” - Kelly Link

50. “Corto à lui même: Ce serait bon de vivre dans une fable.Bouche Dorée à Corto: Oh oui!… Mais toi tu vis continuellement une fable et tu ne t'en aperçois plus. Lorsqu'un adulte entre dans le monde des fables, il ne peut plus en sortir. Le savais-tu?” - Hugo Pratt

51. “Marilynn...passed out black cases to everyone. I opened mine to find an iPad inside. Several candidates whistled. Despite my agitated state, it impressed me too. Maybe wizard school wasn’t going to be as lame as I had thought.“All of your schedules and assignments will be done on these,” Marilynn explained. “The whole school is on these. We’ve had them for awhile now.” - Priya Ardis

52. “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.” - Rachel McAdams

53. “Vane grabbed me. “DuLac, let’s chat.”Chat. British-speak for “Stand still while I yell at you.” - Priya Ardis

54. “Vane’s lips tightened to suppress a smile. “Why so hostile, love?”“You whacked me on the head with a ball!”“You deserved it.” - Priya Ardis

55. “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.” - Anna Sheehan

56. “Once upon a time, they say, there was a girl...there was a boy...there was a person who was in trouble. And this is what she did...and what he did...and how they learned to survive it. This is what they did...and why one failed...and why another triumphed in the end. And I know that it's true, because I danced at their wedding and drank their very best wine.” - Terri Windling

57. “Matt was almost completely naked. A tattered loincloth and an ugly chain with a yellow diamond were his only apparel.” - Priya Ardis

58. “I caught his hand. “What do you want me to do?”Leaning down, he kissed the pulse beating on my neck just above the damaged skin. “Tomorrow, I need you to die.” - Priya Ardis

59. “Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.” - Hans Christian Andersen

60. “Plus, I happened to be a history nerd. Why else would I be interested in a guy born in the year 519?” - Priya Ardis

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

62. “Well, can you tell her that?"He looked down at his feet. "I will. I will."Guy-speak for, "I plan to keep avoiding her until she gives up.” - Priya Ardis

63. “If I were to lock you up in a dungeon, I guarantee you would not be bored.” - Priya Ardis

64. “The last declaration he'd made to me hung between us. The L word. The one that had nothing to do with like.” - Priya Ardis

65. “I don't know these stories as well as they know me, I've discovered.” - Joan Gould

66. “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 those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.” - Marina Warner

67. “Finally, I’d say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don’t be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I’m at work I’m highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what’s more, they’re completely amoral: like the air-spirits who helped Strong Hans escape from the cave, the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever has the ring, whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply, ‘Of course, and this is the way my imagination works.” - Philip Pullman

68. “I believe that our lives, just like fairy tales - the stories that have been written by us humans, through our own experiences of living - will always have a Hero and a Heroine, a Fairy Godmother and a Wicked Witch.” - Lucinda Riley

69. “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.” - Leo Rosten

70. “Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.”I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. “Gets away from what, though?”“From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like ‘happy’ and ‘good’ will never find her.”“You don’t want her to be happy and good?”“I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.” - Helen Oyeyemi

71. “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.” - Traditional folktale ending

72. “I wish for my child to have a mind as stark and wild as the winter, a spirit as clear and fine as my window, and a heart as red and open as my wounded hand.” - Catherynne M. Valente

73. “the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “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.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

74. “Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality.” - L.R. Knost

75. “When assaulted by sexual knowledge for the first time, a girl plunges into a period of blackness, which is required in order to let her emotions catch up with her body.Sleeping Beauty sleeps. Cinderella waits, and while she waits she works her way through the darkness of depression. Snow White both works and sleeps before she is ready to open her eyes and find a Prince leaning over her.” - Joan Gould

76. “He’d used the amulet to read my thoughts again. I pictured smacking him in the face.” - Priya Ardis

77. “I noticed him right away. No, it wasn’t his lean, rugged face. Or the dark waves of shiny hair that hung just a little too long on his forehead. It wasn’t the slim, collarless biker jacket he wore, hugging his lean shoulders. It was the way he stood. The confident way he waited in the cafeteria line to get a slice of pizza. He didn’t saunter. He didn’t amble. He stood at the center, and let the other people buzz around him. His stance was straight and sure.” - Priya Ardis

78. “If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.” - Mo Willems

79. “There once was a woman named Story Easton who couldn't decide if she should kill herself, or eat a double cheeseburger.” - Elizabeth Leiknes

80. “He rarely saw a doorway without advancing through it as if he owned it. Since he owned a good many doorways, he would have pointed out that this was a reasonable assumption.” - Eloisa James

81. “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.” - Marina Warner

82. “If there is one ‘constant’ in the structure and theme of the wonder tale, it is transformation.” - Jack Zipes

83. “Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.” - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

84. “I fear nothing when I am doing right,' said Jack.'Then,' said the lady in the red cap, 'you are one of those who slay giants.” - Andrew Lang

85. “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

86. “...she has been bewitched by a wicked sorceress, and will not regain her beauty until she is my wife.''Does she say so? Well if you believe that you may drink cold water and think it bacon'.” - Andrew Lang

87. “Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must invent or find the means through communication to satisfy as well as resolve conflicting desires and instincts.” - Jack Zipes

88. “Gardens are made of darkness and light entwined.” - F.T. McKinstry

89. “Two forces create eternity – a fairy tale and a dream from the fairy tale.” - Dejan Stojanovic

90. “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.” - Bruno Bettelheim

91. “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 charming sort of way, as it had when Naganya wanted to play at interrogation, while the rest of them wanted chess.” - Catherynne M. Valente

92. “...Myths aren’t fairy tales or legends—they’re an honest attempt to explain mysteries...” - John Geddes

93. “In stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, they always say the heroine is 'as good as she is beautiful.' I wondered if people just wanted that to be true, wanted the beautiful to be good. I wondered if they wanted the ugly to be bad because then they wouldn't have to feel bad for them.” - Alex Flinn

94. “Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.” - Kate Bernheimer

95. “Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.” - Anthony Esolen

96. “I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.” - G.K. Chesterton

97. “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.” - Polly Shulman

98. “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 encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing.Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless.Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live.” - Terri Windling

99. “Maybe the witch thought she was protecting Rapunzel, not punishing her. Maybe she thought that if Rapunzel was locked away, no one could ever hurt her. Maybe the witch kept Rapunzel because she loved her, because she was scared that if other people could get to Rapunzel, they would hurt her. And maybe Rapunzel didn't understand the witch; maybe she was angry at her - but maybe she loved her too.” - Alyssa B. Sheinmel

100. “You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.” - C.S. Lewis

101. “Have you ever pondered the miracle of popcorn? It starts out as a tiny, little, compact kernel with magic trapped inside that when agitated, bursts to create something marvelously desirable. It’s sort of like those tiny, little thoughts trapped inside an author’s head that―in an excited explosion of words―suddenly become a captivating fairy tale!” - Richelle E. Goodrich

102. “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

103. “Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn't it?” - Terry Moore

104. “It's kind of strange...All these so-called myths and fables. Everyone seems to have the same ones. They cross cultures and continents. Everyone has their own versions of unicorns, witches, even the Fates. Now we know why. Because they're real.” - Maurissa Guibord

105. “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.” - Philip Pullman