Fairy Tales For Adults Quotes

“Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“That's the ideal meeting...once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.”
― Helen Oyeyemi

“And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts.”
― Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins

“Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.”
― A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories

“These days when you kiss a prince you often run the risk of turning him into a frog. But don't let the ogres in shining armor get you down. There is no need for distress - you don't want to be anyone's damsel anyway. Simply remind yourself that you are busy racking up those 'frequent failure points' that will eventually pay for an all expenses paid trip to Mr Right.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“It was one of those ones they call screwball comedies, where people mislead and ill-treat each other in the most shocking and baffling way possible, then forgive and forget about it because they happen to like the look of each other. Only they call it falling in love.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.”
― C.S. Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds

“I just wonder… Isn’t it better to start as a monster and become a hero? Isn’t that what creates belief? The idea that someone can change?”
― F. D. Lee, The Fairy's Tale

“The earth sometimes rewards humans who do good works for the planet. Look out for unexpected windfalls of produce from the earth such as baskets of fruit or vegetables given to you unexpectedly, nature handcrafts, or a bunch of flowers picked from a beloved garden. These are all signs that the gifts not only came from the giver but from Mother Earth herself. - Fairy of the woods”
― Sarah Rajkotwala, The Year Of Talking To Plants: The plants and fairies talk in their own words

“Come in, Vasya,' he said. 'It is cold.' Could the snow-laden night speak, it might have spoken with that voice.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

“We live in a world of unfulfilled fairytales.”
― Holly Walrath, Glimmerglass Girl

“And if the characters haven't died, they carry on murdering to this very day ...”
― Rebekka Kricheldorf

“The piano—that, too, was an adventure. A little girl tried to learn to play it. Her mother insisted, forced her to sit there and practice. Nothing came of it; stubbornness won out in the end, the stubbornness that protects us from the will of others, that defends our right to live our life the way we want. Even if it means life will turn out worse than anyone planned, will turn into a poor life—but it'll be one's own, however it is, even without music, even without talent.”
― Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

“You worked at night, when the shadows masked you and you were little more than a dream. You hid in the forest or the mountains, away from the steam engines and the lamps of the cities, the things that would expose you, confirming you and stripping you of your mystery. You showed yourself rarely, and only to the ones who needed to see you. After the free-for-all that was the earlier Chapters, when babies were stolen, young men murdered and maidens locked away, the fae had had to learn to be very careful about their involvement in the lives of the characters, lest they turn still further away from their beliefs.”
― F. D. Lee, The Fairy's Tale

“You don’t know anything about me.”
“No, I know not everything about you. But I sense enough to know you have mistaken obsession with drive, guilt with injustice. I know you want to escape what you are, cabbage fairy,” he said, reaching for his hood and gloves and tucking them into the waistband of his trousers. “Your desires are no different from my own, I simply have the courage to face them.”
― F. D. Lee, The Fairy's Tale

“One is always on time if time doesn't matter to them, little mouse”
― Joanne Ganci, Blue in Wonderland

“What a fairy tale is meant to do," she said, "if it's meant to do anything at all, Tolkien says, is give us new perspective on our world, the consolation of a happy ending. A recovery of sorts. Like we leave that world to see ours anew.”
― Patti Callahan Henry, The Secret Book of Flora Lea

“Amie frowned. 'That’s what I can’t figure out. I mean everyone wants their happy ending, right? No one cares about reading actual literature anymore anyway. All they want is vampires and supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It’s sick, really.”
― Jennifer Silverwood, Silver Hollow

“I’m not… What’s wrong with them believing?” Bea asked, a note of pleading creeping, uninvited, into her voice.
“You do not sell belief, you sell belief-in. Belief in true love, as if everyone were entitled to it. Belief in a simple solution to a complex problem. Belief in one type of person, one type of future.”
“No I don’t. I offer people dreams, and hope, and, and, something to organise their lives with,” Bea said, not sure why she was trying to convince him. “I don’t make them into ‘one person’.”
“Oh no? Let me recall your doctrine: Kings, Princes and their ilk must marry girls whose only asset is their beauty. Not clever girls, not worthy girls, not girls who could rule. Powerful women, older women – like one day you will become – are nought but wicked creatures, consumed with jealousy and unfit to hold position. No,” he said as Bea began to speak, “I am not finished. Let us turn our attention to the men. As long as the woman is something to be won, it follows only the worthy will prevail. It matters not if they truly love the girl, nor if the man is cruel or arrogant or unfit to tie his own doublet. As long as he has wealth and completes whatever trials are decided fit, he is suitable. For what is stupidity or arrogance when compared against a crown? The good will win, and the wicked perish, and you and your stories decide what makes a person good or wicked. Not life. Not choice. Not even common sense. You.”
― F. D. Lee, The Fairy's Tale

“Keep pollinating the world with your kindness.”
― H.L. Balcomb, Cinderella In Focus: "Finding hope when you're feeling a sense of hopelessness!"

“Arian's ebony hair was spread in a shimmering fan around her shoulders, reminding Tristan absurdly of Snow White in her glass coffin. Even in death, hadn't the deceptive blush of life stained Snow White's pallid cheeks? Hadn't her rosebud lips parted as if to welcome a kiss from a prince who might never come? Hadn't the creamy swell of her breasts tantalized every hopelessly naive kid in the theater into daring to believe her chest would rise just one more time?”
― Teresa Medeiros, Breath of Magic

“She soaked her feet in salt and stared up at the stars and wondered whether drowning would hurt.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, The Starlit Wood

“So you see? The fairytale got it all wrong, it was not my grandmother who made me the cloak, but it was my mother and I’s own hands that wove together the seams that would forever erase my name from history. Instead, to be known forevermore as—Little Red Riding Hood.”
― Melanie Frome, Little Red & The Wolf: A Fairytale Unleashed

“Then Hope, that most precarious of human emotions, slipped in on silent tiptoes.”
― E. L. Miller, Once Upon a Today

“Widespread legend is to think you're a legend.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“What an idiot I am. I created a pact with children. Not even a blood pact but a vow that yields nothing for my kettle or Wake. A vow born of weakness. But a vow all the same. I will not fail them, no matter the cost.”
― N.D. Jones, Bearly Gold: A Goldilocks and the Three Bears Reimagining

“No mission ever mattered. They were all inconsequential except as the most direct route to retirement. Then a small human girl held my hand and looked at me without an ounce of fear but with pounds of faith.”
― N.D. Jones, Bearly Gold: A Goldilocks and the Three Bears Reimagining

“Fayola wore nothing underneath. Nothing but skin in need of his touch. Hands, mouth and more. "Six months," she said, her voice a sultry whisper of repressed need.”
― N.D. Jones, Bearly Gold: A Goldilocks and the Three Bears Reimagining

“Once upon a time, in the strange town of Balar, there were two handsome brothers, Pierre and Mathéo.”
― Marcel M. du Plessis, The Curse of Balar

“Fairytales do tend to "dragon.”
― Lynn Byk, The Fearless Moral Inventory of Elsie Finch