A Quote by Audrey Niffenegger

Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.

Audrey Niffenegger

Quote Topics

Adventures Always Children Darling Fairy Fairy Tale Fairy Tales Fine Fly Home Minute Mothers Stay Stay At Home Tales Think Wait Window

Quote Author

Audrey Niffenegger
American - Writer
Born: June 13, 1963

Many people think fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales are only for children, but I'm not the only writer to take an old tale and retell it for a sophisticated adult audience.

Kate Forsyth

I just imagined how fine it would be if the children could adopt mothers, of course, mothers who were single, without other children, living in a comfortable apartment, and ready to care for the children.

Lidija Dimkovska

I did translations of Grimms' Fairy Tales and became very charmed about that way of looking at things. Fairy tales tell a lot of truths. Just as a side point, for instance, we always think the bad guys in fairy tales are the stepmothers, who are witches. But where are the fathers when the witches are killing and mishandling their children? Away. They are on a business trip. They are hunting, they are away. Wow, you know! No one says the fathers are the bad guys! It's one of the things you don't say. But my goodness, where are they?

Lore Segal

Both at-home and working mothers can overmeet their mothering responsibilities. In order to justify their jobs, working mothers can overnurture, overconnect with, and overschedule their children into activities and classes. Similarly, some at-home mothers,... can make at- home mothering into a bigger deal than it is, over stimulating, overeducating, and overwhelming their children with purposeful attention.

Jean Marzollo

Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for very young children, this is a relatively modern idea. In the oral tradition, magical stories were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, while literary fairy tales (including most of the tales that are best known today) were published primarily for adult readers until the 19th century.

Terri Windling

The children know all about everything so well that it never occurs to them to play at the situations in any one of these tales, or even to read it twice over. But let them have tales of the imagination, scenes laid in other lands and other times, heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy tales in which they are never roughly pulled up by the impossible —even where all is impossible, and they know it, and yet believe.

Charlotte Mason

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it. We were children loving our children. And that's who we are still.

Marlena De Blasi

When you're a kid, you think you can jump out the window and be okay. But when you get older, you think, "Wait a minute - I can't fly!"

Ralph Lauren

Knowledge is the key to stopping the spread of AIDS. Yet millions of children are missing an education. Missing their teachers who have died of the disease. Missing from class as they stay home to care for their dying mothers and fathers. Children are missing your support. United for Children. Unite against AIDS.

Susan Sarandon

I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.

A. S. Byatt

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

Monica Bellucci

All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

Fay Weldon

I know that a lot of feminist fears about the trans movement have been, "Wait, we never got to the part where we focus on women! We tried for a minute, but we don't want to lose the category all of a sudden. We haven't heard yet from the females with children called mothers, we haven't heard yet from all these groups!" On the one hand I'm very sympathetic to that, but the category of Women or Mothers, any of these categories, are on shifting sands and always have been.