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“Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.��
I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. “Gets away from what, though?��
“From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like ‘happy�� and ‘good�� will never find her.��
“You don’t want her to be happy and good?��
“I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

“It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Ugly Duckling

“Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient

“The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.”
― Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

“Seeing the transformation in Aaron made me wonder how it would feel to have someone-even a not-so-nice guy like Aaron- look at me the way he looked at Anjali.”
― Polly Shulman, The Grimm Legacy

“And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. That too is a great advantage of the folk tale. It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary of its being blue- and not to notice how blue it is. And appreciation of the subtler colors of the sky will come later. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation. It is what will enable the child later on to understand Macbeth, or Don Quixote, or David Copperfield.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.”
― Kate Bernheimer

“There once was a woman named Story Easton who couldn't decide if she should kill herself, or eat a double cheeseburger.”
― Elizabeth Leiknes, The Understory

“Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing.

Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless.

Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live.”
― Terri Windling, The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People

“The happily ever after thing. It's great when she marries the prince or whatever and they say that. But they just don't show the part where there's a revolution and they drag her to the guillotine.”
― Mark D. Diehl, Vida Nocturna

“One of my favourite things to do when I write is to bring a sense of wonder to a normal everyday setting... Yes, there are magical elements, but there are also very down-to-earth elements and often what shines through isn’t the magic, but the lanterns that the characters light against the dark... If you substitute the words “fairy tale�� or “myth�� for “fantasy,�� the reason I use these elements in my own work is that they create resonances that illuminate solutions to the real world struggle without the need for an authorial voice to point them out. Magic never solves the problems–we have to do that on our own–but in fiction it allows the dialogue to have a much more organic approach than the talking heads one can encounter in fiction that doesn’t utilize the same tools.

[from the interview ]”
― Charles de Lint

“There is a kind of truth in everything, even fairytales. In fact, especially in fairytales... The King understood it as he looked out from the roof of the Temple and saw the clouds flying past and the green fields far beneath him. He knew that some things are real whether you believe in them or not...
(The Thirteenth King)”
― Elizabeth Hopkinson

“Goldenrod Moram had a first name that sounded like it belonged in the middle of a fairy tale, where she would be the dazzling princess in need of rescuing.”
― Sarvenaz Tash, The Mapmaker and the Ghost