#tales

Two forces create eternity – a fairy tale and a dream from the fairy tale. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dream #dreams #fairy-tale #fairy-tales #literature

Why should I laugh?' asked the old man. 'Madness in youth is true wisdom. Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it. ↗

— Andrew Lang

#fairy-tales #happiness #inspirational #madness #wisdom

In fairy tales, the children are saved by caring adults. We need more caring adults in the lives of our children. ↗

— Donna Shalala

#children #fairy #fairy tales #lives #more

For a momente she [Gretel] stopped and considered following the rain's advice. But then she shook her head. "You're being foolish," Gretel told herself. "Rain can't talk." No, of course it can't. The moon can eat children, and fingers can open doors, and people's heads can be put back on. But rain? Talk? Don't be ridiculous. Good thinking, Gretel dear. Good thinking. ↗

— Adam Gidwitz

#humor #humor

For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world. ↗

— Angela Carter

#folk-tales #imagination

And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. That too is a great advantage of the folk tale. It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary of its being blue- and not to notice how blue it is. And appreciation of the subtler colors of the sky will come later. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation. It is what will enable the child later on to understand Macbeth, or Don Quixote, or David Copperfield. ↗

— Anthony Esolen

#fairy-tales #good-and-evil #imagination

I'll tell you a secret. Old storytellers never die. They disappear into their own story. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#stories #story #storyteller #storytelling #tale

Can you not see, […] that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is-what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is-what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#life

My first and last philosophy ... I learnt in the nursery... The things I believed then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales... They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic... Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth ... I knew the magic beanstalk before I tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon. I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#life

For seven men she gave her life. For one good man she was his wife. Beneath the ice by Snow White Falls, there lies the fairest of them all. ↗

— Kathryn Wesley

#life