Home > Topic > fairy stories
1 " Away with them, away; we should not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good. Think of them as persons from the fairy wood. "
― Stevie Smith , Selected Poems
2 " The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed. "
― G.K. Chesterton
3 " There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. All we have is the living example of people who are least good, or our own intuition. "
― Ian Fleming , Casino Royale (James Bond, #1)
4 " There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state. "
― André Breton , Manifestoes of Surrealism
5 " Now fairy stories are at risk too, like the forests. Padraic Column has suggested that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when people could read and be productive after dark, something fundamental changed, and there was no longer need or space for the ancient oral tradition. The stories were often confined to books, which makes the text static, and they were handed over to children. "
