Fairy Stories Quotes - Page 2

• As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield, I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn't actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course, as we all know from fairy stories, when you achieve that ambition, you find out you don't want it.

  Jarvis Cocker

  Growing Up, Ambition, Kids

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• Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story.

  Aldous Huxley

  Children, Book, Fate

  Aldous Huxley (1932). “Rotunda: a selection from the works of Aldous Huxley”

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• It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless universe, living its brief life uncared for, on this dark, cooling star: but even so - and all the more - what marvelous creatures we are! What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the jinns, is a hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians! It is so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is - blind or not - a good world to live in, a promising universe. . . . We once thought we lived on God's footstool, it may be a throne.

  Clarence Day

  Life, Stars, Dark

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• I was always fascinated by fairy stories, fantasy, you know, demons, necromancers, gods and goddesses, everything that is out of our kin and out of our everyday world. I was always interested in enchantment and magicians and still am.

  Christopher Lee

  Everyday, Gods And Goddesses, World

  Source: www.npr.org

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• In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Smart, Book, School

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• Creationists reject Darwin's theory of evolution on the grounds that it is "just a theory". This is a valid criticism: evolution is indeed merely "a theory", albeit one with ten billion times more credence than the theory of creationism - although, to be fair, the theory of creationism is more than just a theory. It's also a fairy story. And children love fairy stories, which is presumably why so many creationists are keen to have their whimsical gibberish taught in schools.

  Charlie Brooker

  Children, School, Theory Of Evolution

  "When it comes to psychics, my stance is hardcore: they must die alone in windowless cells" by Charlie Brooker, www.theguardian.com. December 3, 2006.

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• Atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the Light.

  John Lennox

  Light, Afterlife, People

  "An Evening With John Lennox". "The Spirit of Things" with Rachael Kohn, www.abc.net.au. August 7, 2011.

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• Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people's lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Nice, People, Wicked

  "'About the Author', The Many Worlds of Diana Wynne Jones". Published by HarperCollins, 2005.

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• The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside. The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling. And I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the long mahogany banquet table, draped in linen, laden with china and candles and fruit and flowers, had simply vanished into thin air, like a magic casket in a fairy story.

  Donna Tartt

  Wall, Flower, Reflection

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.85, Vintage

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• To become a big movie star like Joan Crawford you need to wear blinders and pay single-minded attention to your career. Nobody paid attention to me, including me. I was the original Cinderella girl, looking for the happy ending in the fairy story. But my fantasy prince never came.

  Evelyn Keyes

  Girl, Stars, Careers

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• I loved [fairy stories] so, and my mother weighed down by grief had given up telling me them. At Nohant I found Mmes. d'Ardony's and Perrault's tales in old editions which became my chief joy for five or six years ... I've never read them since, but I could tell each tale straight through, and I don't think anything in all one's intellecutal life can be compared to these delights of imagination.

  George Sand

  Mother, Grief, Thinking

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• I was the original Cinderella girl, looking for the happy ending in the fairy story. But my fantasy prince never came.

  Evelyn Keyes

  Girl, Fantasy, Happy Endings

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• When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.

  Salman Rushdie

  Strong, Race, Ideas

  Salman Rushdie (2012). “Joseph Anton”, p.345, Random House

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• There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.

  Andre Breton

  Adults, Green, States

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• Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Names, Magic, Darren

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• I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Wall, Home, Men

  "On Fairy-Stories". Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrews on March 08, 1939. "Essays presented to Charles Williams", 1947.

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• I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories.

  Hedy Lamarr

  Children, Father, Fire

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• Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.

  John Fowles

  Cancer, Love You, Three

  John Fowles (1980). “The collector”, Dell Pub Co

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• I'm an interpreter of stories. When I perform it's like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.

  Nat King Cole

  Piano, Sitting Down, Tooth Fairy

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• I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

  Stephen Hawking

  Death, Suicide, Dark

  "Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'". Interview with Ian Sample, www.theguardian.com. May 15, 2011.

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• For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Love, Children, Latin

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• A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Science, Facts, Deny

  Concept of Mind (1949) introduction

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• It's almost a sort of fairy story tale, just what a novelist would write about a discovery.

  Charles Hard Townes

  Writing, Science, Discovery

  "Nobel Prize in Physics". The Academy of Achievement interview, www.achievement.org. March 18, 1991.

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• ....This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.

  Hendrik Willem van Loon

  Sea, Long, Goal

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• There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

  Stephen Hawking

  Dark, Afterlife, People

  "Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'". Interview with Ian Sample, www.theguardian.com. May 15, 2011.

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