Quotes ‘In Praise of Fairytales’
Audrey Hepburn
“If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.”
“If I ever want to accentuate the importance of anything in any form of entertainment, it is the quality of the fairy tale… People go to the theatre and the cinema for the same reason that makes them like fairy tales- the sense of watching something that isn’t real. The fairy tale is, to my mind, the core of entertainment.”
Albert Einstein
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
Hans Christian Andersen
“Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.”
“Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.”
E.T.A. Hoffman
“The human spirit is itself the most wonderful fairy tale that can possibly be. What a magnificent world lies enclosed within our bosoms! No solar orbit hems it in, the inexhaustible wealth of the total visible creation is outweighed by its riches!”
Charles Dickens
“In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected."
J.R.R. Tolkien
“The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.”
Lucy Maud Montgomery
“The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and storytellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.”
C.S. Lewis
“Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
“Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines. “
“At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.”
Michel Ocelot
“Fairy tales have a hidden power, and their appeal never ends. They're the best way to get messages across.”
W.B. Yeats
“Folk art is, indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted. Wherever it is spoken by the fireside, or sung by the roadside, or carved into the lintel, appreciation of the arts that a single mind gives unity and design to, spreads quickly when its hour is come.”
Bruno Bettelheim
“The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrowminded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales’ concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner process taking place in an individual.”
Angela Carter
“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 labour created our world.”
