“So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.”

“This true difference in me now: I had these experiances, these tales, more of this life. So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.”

“Nothing is sadder than a child burdened by reality, after all. Those stories were our family fairy tales.”

“This isn’t a nice story, and this isn’t an easy story. But it is a story about fairies, so feel free to think of it as a fairy story. It’s not like you’d believe it anyway.”

“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.”

“I'd spent endless nights wishing things had been different - wishing that ours had been a fairy-tale story. But, it wasn't. It couldn't be.”