Marina Warner Quotes

Quotes about:

• Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.

  Marina Warner

  Mother, Men, Maps

  9 Copy quote

• Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

  Marina Warner

  Flow, Kind, Figures

  Marina Warner (1987). “Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form”, Picador

  8 Copy quote

• I have always argued that we can't live by or be made to exist outside of mythology, and that every group and nation has, possibly unacknowledged to themselves, some myths by which they live. It remains important to revisit them, understand them and possibly retell them - or at least own up to them - and then it becomes possible to move something. If it's obscure or invisible to you, you can't budge those understandings.

  Marina Warner

  Moving, Understanding, Important

  Source: therumpus.net

  9 Copy quote

• I am not a great believer in dialectical struggle. I am much more of a fusion person. I see it as a dialogue, or trialogue, or polylogue: many, many, many voices, going back a long way. The cultural picture is much more mutually enriching at many different levels, manufacturers...absolutely, design and calligraphy. It's an amazing amount of cross-interests between people.

  Marina Warner

  Struggle, Voice, Long

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.

  Marina Warner

  Essence, Males, Female

  Marina Warner (2000). “Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form”, p.69, Univ of California Press

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Odds, Teeth, Fairy Tale

  7 Copy quote

• The Grimm brothers always said that their informants were women, which is possibly not true, women of the people. There is the constant evocation of women's voices, in the collecting and arrangement of these stories, and yet the message of so many of them is incredibly misogynist. I was very puzzled by that, and that book explores that contradiction.

  Marina Warner

  Brother, Book, Voice

  Source: therumpus.net

  8 Copy quote

• There is humanist enterprise of the book, and amongst that there are many, many stories. And that is why at the end, when he says that the stories are so illuminating that they must be engraved and encased in gold and put in the palace library, the people who compile the book are telling us that this is a collection of human wisdom.

  Marina Warner

  Book, People, Library

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Scheherazade, of course, was always in the back of my mind, because she's also a storyteller identified as female who tells a lot of anti-female stories. There's a parade in The Arabian Nights of sorceresses, adulteresses, ghouls, sirens, harridans.

  Marina Warner

  Night, Ghouls, Mind

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.

  Marina Warner

  Pain, Vocabulary, Pleasure

  Marina Warner (2003). “Signs & wonders: essays on literature & culture”, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Lying, Character, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• One of the things I try to do is try to make repetitions, rhymes, and mirrorings across the subject matter of my own books so that the chapter titles and the epigraphs and pictures all kind of form a tapestry. In this book, I retell fifteen of the stories. You have the critical frame, and then you have these rosettes like the motif in a carpet.

  Marina Warner

  Book, Trying, Titles

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.

  Marina Warner

  People, Cosmos, Culture

  8 Copy quote

• Love can make you turn on yourself, and it can do harmful things to you. It's a deep lesson in human psychology, as with many of the stories. Anyways, that's just an example of one of the most wicked women in the Nights.

  Marina Warner

  Night, Psychology, Wicked

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I do think that this represents a kind of shift towards myth, a recovery of myth, largely through the popularity of writers like Philip Pullman. Somehow myths have returned as a serious subject. It used to be scorned...really scorned. It was part of a nursery tradition, and it was also rather tainted - but not in an immovable way - by the association with right-wing ideologies after the World Wars.

  Marina Warner

  War, Recovery, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• The technique of the book and the technique carried by the figure of Scheherazade is one of opening the Sultan's mind. He's emblematic of the ignorant person: the ignorant, lock-in, raging man who wants to kill all he doesn't understand. The model of the book is the extraordinary, very-large, Mirror of Princes.

  Marina Warner

  Book, Men, Mirrors

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I don't think that there's a target audience at all. These stories were in circulation. The stories were told by men, told in the marketplace by men, but also behind doors by women, but there's no real record of this. It's likely they were told by women to children in their interior rooms. The story could be a negative story, they could be presented as a, "Watch out! Women will get round you, do things to you, weave you in their toils." It could be buried in it an old cautionary story about women and their wiles.

  Marina Warner

  Children, Real, Men

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Many of the enchanted things in the book are lamps, carpets, sofas, gems, brass rings. It is a rather different landscape than the fairy tale landscape of the West. Though we have interiors and palaces, we don't have bustling cities, and there isn't the emphasis on the artisan making things. The ambiance from which they were written was an entirely different one. The Arabian Nights comes out of a huge world of markets and trade. Cairo, Basra, Damascus: trades and skills.

  Marina Warner

  Book, Night, Skills

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days.

  Marina Warner

  Gentleman, Special, World

  Marina Warner (2013). “Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary”, OUP Oxford

  6 Copy quote

• An interesting example is that the worst woman in the book, who is so cruel and violent, is the sorceress in "The Prince of the Black Islands." She's a beautiful young woman, and she has turned her husband into stone from the waist down. A traveling sultan finds him, in his dreadful state, and the man petrified from the waist down tells his sad story...how his wife comes every afternoon and beats him until the blood runs down. She's just unwontedly, arbitrarily cruel.

  Marina Warner

  Beautiful, Running, Husband

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.

  Marina Warner

  Heart, Journey, Humanity

  Marina Warner (2001). “The Leto bundle”, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

• Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, traders, merchants, travelers, with a wide range of personalities.

  Marina Warner

  Night, Class, Cities

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• There are a range of women not represented in the Western fairy tale tradition. Husband-beaters are particularly interesting, as well as male pederasts. Children are often told in The Arabian Nights, "This man likes to abduct boys, be careful of him." These issues are explored through the medium of the stories, but actually the architecture of the book is such that there are many examples of women who are loyal, brave, devoted - especially to their lovers.

  Marina Warner

  Children, Husband, Book

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.

  Marina Warner

  Spring, Opposites, Desire

  Marina Warner, Sophie Herxheimer, Gilbert Adair (1994). “Wonder Tales”, p.3, Oxford University Press on Demand

  4 Copy quote

• When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.

  Marina Warner

  Photographer, Young, Bookworms

  "What I see in the mirror" by Marina Warner, www.theguardian.com. November 02, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

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