Top 222 Tales Quotes

I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them.

Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales.

I love fairy tales because I think that behind fairy tales, there is always a meaning.

Its a strange thing because the West is rooted in a very harsh reality of hard living and scratching out a life for yourself, but its also wrapped in this mythos. There are of these tall tales and crazy stories about the West that you hear and can never really be sure of whats true and whats not.

Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

Even as a kid, I read ‘Jung – Reflections and Individuation In Fairy Tales’; all the inner circle of Jung was a real huge thing for me.

My husband and I like to reminisce about how, when we were 9, we read straight through L. Frank Baum’s ‘Oz’ series, books filled with wizards and witches. And you know what those subversive tales taught us? That we loved to read!

The existence of life beyond Earth is an ancient human concern. Over the years, however, attempts to understand humanity’s place in the cosmos through science often got hijacked by wishful thinking or fabricated tales.

Certain of Poe’s tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story.

The woeful tales of ‘Super Mario Bros.’ and ‘Street Fighter’ have taught studios that merely slapping a name to a movie is not enough to bring in the fans of the franchise. Also, the way games now unfold their stories more parallels that of a movie, with characters and plot points actually meaning as much as a high score.

To be honest, Peter Pan was one of those fairy tales that I sort of related to, and I think that’s the case with a lot of kids.

I have a daughter, Hanna, and I never read fairy tales to her. But I did tell her bedtime tales and made up many tales involving ‘Gory the Goblin’ and other creatures that I borrowed from the Grimms’ tales and other tales I knew.

My father was full of tales. He said his family were ministers in the Church of Scotland, or they were lawyers.

‘The Thing from Another World’ was the first movie that really scared me. But the one that made me want to make movies was ‘The Tales of Hoffman.’ That’s my favorite film of all time. It’s a fantasy film. It’s an opera. I never get tired of it.

Obscure as still remains the origin of that ‘genre’ of romance to which the tales before us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople.

We as a people need to declare that we stand with rule of law and not with the false tales of the revolutionary Marxist forces, who most recently have rebranded themselves from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter.

Fairy tales are with us day in and day out, not just in commercials, but references in the theater, movies, museums, schools, etc.

I think people should read fairy tales, because we’re hungry for a mythology that will speak to our fears.

‘Tales From Topographic Oceans’ is like a woman’s padded bra. The cover looks good, but when you peel off the padding, there’s not a lot there.

No element gets people telling crazy stories like mercury does. People have told me tales about pharmacists waxing floors with mercury, mothers rubbing it into babies’ skin to kill germs, and 10-year-olds coating dimes in it to make them shine, then blithely carrying them around in their pockets.

Great deeds give choice of many tales. Choose a slight tale, enrich it large, and then let wise men listen.

I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors.

When I was four years old, my father, who was a colonel in the army, was stationed in Salzburg, Austria. Across the street from our house was an ancient castle on a cliff. So when I first heard fairy tales, I felt as if the magic of ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’ was taking place right in my own neighborhood.

When our ancestors crouched about the camp fire at night, they told each other tales of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels, to hold back the terrors of the night. Such tales comforted and entertained, diverted and educated those who listened, and helped shape their sense of the world and their place in it.

Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn’t a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.

I’m a great believer in fairy tales. I think it is important to have something you can lose yourself in.

I am familiar with the Odiyan legend, as my mother used to tell me that her grandmother would narrate the Odiyan tales while she grew up in Palakkad.

The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of ‘Tales from Livy’ that I’d found in my grandfather’s library.

‘For Those Who Can Tell No Tales’ is a story of memory and the energy of places that remain full of drama, pain, and denial.

I always wanted to be on ‘Sesame Street,’ that kind of a thing, puppets and fun and original songs and fairy tales.

Fairy tales, which teach a moral lesson, are about ourselves. Myth deals with forces greater than ourselves.

Once you fall for someone, their smell can be a powerful thing. Women will wear their boyfriends’ T-shirts, and throughout tales in history men have held on to their lover’s handkerchief.

I think writers from both East and West have long been fascinated by the ancient tales and the opportunity to reinterpret them.

I find inspiration from a lot of different texts and really old stories and folk tales – things I feel like no one else is reading.

I loved fairy tales growing up.

Emily Dickinson has haunted my life – her poems, her persona, all the tales about her solitude. Ever since I discovered her in the seventh grade, I’ve had a crush on that spinster in white, who had such a heroic and startling inner landscape of her own.

Sometimes you have to censor books. When I read ‘Peter Rabbit,’ I skip the part about Peter’s father ending up in one of Mrs. McGregor’s pies. I also hid the book of ‘Grimm Fairy Tales.’ They’re just too grim for my grandkids. Reality will come soon enough.

The son has always felt like he was a footnote in one of the stories the father tells. The father is an amazing storyteller and one of the tales that he tells is how he met his wife.

Vampires have become tragic or romantic figures. Vampire are largely seduction tales. They’re no longer the scary creature in the dark.

I’m no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it’s got everything: it’s a book of poetry, it’s a book of principle, it’s a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.

The naturalist worldview is a good way to feel grounded and feel part of something that isn’t based on fairy tales. It’s based on observable facts in the human and in the biological history of the planet. I think that can be a source for comfort.

Up to 1870, it was equally said of France and of Italy that they possessed no folk-tales. Yet, within fifteen years from that date, over 1000 tales had been collected in each country.

I’m not born again, I’m not Kabbalah, God forbid, but I did have an experience hitting 30 that I needed to lean on something that assured me that everything is going to be okay. I had to regain a lot of my belief in fairy tales, in happy endings.

My father leaving the family shaped who I was and how I looked at the world. By the same token, my father telling me fairy tales that he had made up shaped me profoundly, too.

Fairy tales opened up a door into my imagination – they don’t conform to the reality that’s around you as a child. I started reading when I was three and read everything, but I wanted to be an actress.

The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.

Folk tales and myths, they’ve lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them.

Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.

People don’t like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

As a girl, I sat awestruck at the feet of Harriet Ne, author of ‘Tales of Molokai’. It was she who used to say, ‘I myself have seen it,’ after telling a particularly hair-raising ghost story – a phrase that I borrowed for one of my titles.

My parents were of the generation that lived through the Second World War, but I grew up listening to my mother recounting her dad’s tales about his terrible experiences during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and later on the Western Front.