“The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.”
― Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

“A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.”
― Marina Warner, The Leto Bundle

“The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.”
― Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

“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

“Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.”
― Marina Warner

“Angela Carter...refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale’s rescuer, the form’s own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself.

(from "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter")”
― Marina Warner

“The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul--lust.”
― Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary

“Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.”
― Marina Warner

“If you remember the pleasure of hearing a story many times, and you will remember that while you were listening you become three people. There is an incredible fusion: you become the storyteller, the protagonist, and you remember yourself listening to the story.”
― Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

“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

“The seductive invitation of metamorphosis - of turning into something other — has continued to suffuse fantasies of identity; on the one hand holding out a way of escape from humanity, on the other annihilating the self.”
― Marina Warner

“The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.”
― Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form

“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

“The she-monster is hardly a new phenomenon. The idea of a female untamed nature which must be leashed or else will wreak havoc closely reflects mythological heroes’ struggles against monsters. Greek myth alone offers a host - of Ceres, Harpies, Sirens, Moirae. Associated with fate and death in various ways, they move swiftly, sometimes on wings; birds of prey are their closest kin - the Greeks didn’t know about dinosaurs - and they seize as in the word raptor. But seizure also describes the effect of the passions on the body; inner forces, looser, madness, arte, folly, personified in Homer and the tragedies as feminine, snatch and grab the interior of the human creature and take possession.”
― Marina Warner, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time: The Reith Lectures 1994

“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

“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

“It’s a long time ago that I lost my faith in Mary, a long time since she was the fulcrum of the scheme of salvation I then believed in, alongside Jesus the chief redeemer. But I find that the symbolism of mercy and love which her figure has traditionally expressed has migrated and now shapes secular imagery and events; Catholic worship and moral teaching no longer monopolize it or control its significance.”
― Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary

“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

“The Other Worlds which fairy tales explore open a way for writers and storytellers to speak in Other terms, especially when the native inhabitants of the imaginary places do not belong to an established living faith and therefore do not command belief or repudiation. The tongue can be very free when it is speaking outside the jurisdiction of religion.”
― Marina Warner

“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

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

“Above all, love must be freely given, by mutual consent on both sides, through the exercise of free will. Because it is thus freely chosen, it is an act of humanity and civilisation, neither a daemonic possession such as hurled Dido upon her funeral pyre or Medea upon her children, not the base stirrings of concupiscence.”
― Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary

“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

“But though the two young writers are ostensibly concerned with children, they do not only mean children: when Coleridge invokes the imagination of a child, he is yearning for its power for himself. The child might be father to the man, as Wordsworth famously wrote in his ode, 'Intimations of Immortality', but that paternity was, ideally, internal and present and active: the Romantics were the first to conceive of the Inner Child, and to yearn to reinstate the child's sway over the adult. They expressed nostalgia for childhood; but even more acutely, they longed for childlikeness to endure in order to keep their faculties quick and fertile. And between them, Charles Lamb and Coleridge pioneered the idea of the crossover text, the work of fantasy that appeals across generations, such as 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', or, as it would turn out, Tales from Shakespeare.”
― Marina Warner, Tales from Shakespeare

“Inequality is catching.”
― Marina Warner, Into the Dangerous World: Some Reflections on Childhood and Its Costs

“As the queen [Sheba] makes her approach toward Jerusalem, she comes to a footbridge across the stream of Kidron, flowing below the mount where Solomon built his temple; this footbridge is made of wood destined to become the cross on which the Savior will be crucified [Out of the Garden].”
― Marina Warner

“For some, the unborn child is sacred to a degree the teenager never attains.”
― Marina Warner, Into the Dangerous World: Some Reflections on Childhood and Its Costs

“Britain was the last developed country where beating schoolchildren was respectable. This was outlawed last year [1988] - by one vote in Parliament. Parents are now almost the last people left who can hit children without fear of penalty, as long as it's moderate and fitting punishment...the language of authority still derives from violence, mistakenly, tragically.”
― Marina Warner, Into the Dangerous World: Some Reflections on Childhood and Its Costs