English Fairy Tales

Famous quotes containing the words fairy tales, english, fairy and/or tales:

    “What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.”
    —Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)

    “English audiences of working people are like an instrument that responds to the player. Thought ripples up and down them, and if in some heart the speaker strikes a dissonance there is a swift answer. Always the voice speaks from gallery or pit, the terrible voice which detaches itself in every English crowd, full of caustic wit, full of irony or, maybe, approval.”
    —Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)

    “Fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because—despite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content—these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own.”
    —Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)

    “Among the Indians he had fought;
    And with him many tales he brought
    Of pleasure and of fear;
    Such tales as told to any Maid
    By such a Youth, in the green shade,
    Were perilous to hear.”
    —William Wordsworth (1770–1850)