“Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.”

“Our heroine knew that the mother would always leave the window open for her children to fly back by; so they stayed away for years and had a lovely time...”

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

“After a childhood reading fairy tales and myths, is it any wonder that when I began to write my own stories I included fairy tales? Fairy tales are storytelling at its most basic. They’ve been with mankind for as long as people have told stories to each other. Fairy tales speak to something intrinsic in humans—they touch our most primitive selves. How else to explain that the Cinderella story is told in nearly every society on earth? To think of fairy tales as merely stories for children is to ignore thousands of years when fairy tales were used to teach morality, to warn, and to entertain both children and adults.”

“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.”

“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.”