“at the center of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power.”

“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.”

“Did this mean every impossible fairy tale was grounded somewhere in absolute truth? Was there anything sane or normal at all, or was everything just magic and ghost stories?”

“It's all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.”

“I’d believed in that story, the story of us. It was still there,that antiquated fairy tale notion. I was older now, though, and it wastime to let the fairy tale go.”

“Ever since Eliza had discovered the book of fairy tales . . . had disappeared inside its faded pages, she'd understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.”