Once Upon a Time Quotes

“Storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets.”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“Theories about world literature, of which fairy tale is a fundamental part, emphasize the porousness of borders, geographical and inguistic: no frontiercan keep a good story from roaming. It will travel, and travel far, and travel back again in a different guise, a changed mood, and, above all, a new meaning.”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“Like ´Bluebeard´, the fairy tale of ´Snow White´does not record a single, appalling crime, but testifies to a structural and endemic conflict in society that was political and social as well as personal, producing many, many instances of similar violence.”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“The forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered.”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“Behind every book for young people and every global product of family entertainment, the hum of boardroom discussion about the politics of the work can be heard.”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit.”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“Aarne-Thompson-Uther index”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“In The Invention of Literature (1999), the classical scholar Florence Dupont reminds us that many of the greatest works of human imagination were created to be performed, to be heard. Before the printing press and mass literacy, the written versions existed as blueprints or records of performances, recitals, speeches, songs, and other forms of oral communication. Voicing was an art of living creators, and the voice of the storyteller was”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“Mary Jane Clairmont, the second wife of William Godwin, and Mary Shelley’s stepmother, had the idea of bringing out French fairy tales for children in an attempt to make some much needed money for the family (she has not been given her due by biographers, in my view).”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“in 1068, it would have already been impossible for Hansel and Gretel to walk more than four miles through any English wood without bursting back out into open fields. The landscape of fairy tales is symbolic: "The forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered.”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“a world in a grain of sand | And a heaven in a wild flower’.”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits …”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale