Gaea?” Leo shook his head. “Isn’t that Mother Nature? She’s supposed to have, like, flowers in her hair and birds singing around her and dear and rabbits doing her laundry.”“Leo, that’s Snow White,” Piper said.

My heart broke a little at her unblemished view of life: She still believed in innocent secrets, the heady rush of a good mystery, and happily ever after... (I wasn't about to disabuse her of those sweet notions.)...Little girls should be allowed to dream.

All the queens of my acquaintance have children, some three, some seven, and some as many as twelve; and my queen has not one. I feel ill-used." So he made up his mind to be cross with his wife about it. But she bore it all like a good patient queen as she was.

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.

Haven't you noticed most of your fairy tales take place in the woods?” a man a few feet from me says. He stutters and lets a belch escape him. “That's why we're out here. We were hoping Jimmi would bring enough damsels for us all, though!

Thankfully, the farmers understand my request that the children not be allowed to peer through the windows at me.It would be alarming for them to see me with their dolls, to see me using the knife on their faces. There are some things children never should see.

The thing about fairy tales is that the princess find her prince, but there's usually a price to pay. A compromise is required for happily ever after. The woman in the fair tale is general the one who pays the price. This seems to be the nature of sacrifice.

Everything beautiful is golden and strewn with pearls. Even golden people live here. But misfortune is a dark power, a monstrous, cannibalistic giant, who is, however, vanquished, because a good woman, who happily knows how to avert disaster, stands ready to help.

... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker.

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.

Hammer", I finished lamely, as he waited patiently for my thoughts to find their voice, "we have got to find better words for the things we have in our hearts.""Words seem to be weak things," he murmured into my hair, and I could only hope our hearts would prove stronger.

It dawned on her as she grew older, that fairy tales instilled false hopes in people, and that no white knights existed in this world. The mothers should be well aware of that aspect of reality, so why they fed their daughters with the same crap for centuries baffled her.

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.

Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality -- for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.

We may say that the characters in fairytales are ‘good to think with’…[and that] the job of the fairytale is to show that Why? questions cannot be answered except in one way: by telling the stories. The story does not contain the answer, it is the answer.