Marina Warner Quotes
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.
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.
Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.
If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.
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.
The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days.
Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.
When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.
I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.
Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called ‘erotika pathemata’ by the Greeks - tales of erotic suffering.
The stories are most often about justice. In her stories, those who commit injustice, or act tyrannically, come to no good. They are punished.
Storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets.