A Quote by Terri Windling

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

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Adult Alike Best Century Children Enjoyed Fairy Fairy Tale Fairy Tales Idea Including Intended Known Listeners Literary Magical Modern Most Now Old Oral Oral Tradition Primarily Published Readers Relatively Stories Tales Think Though Today Tradition Until Very Were While Young Young And Old Young Children

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Terri Windling
American - Artist

I think almost everybody enjoyed fairy tales when they were young, tales of witches and ogres and monsters and dragons and so forth. You get a little bit older, you can't read fairy tales any more.

Stan Lee

The fact that fairy tales remain a literary underdog - undervalued and undermined - even as they shape so many popular stories, redoubles my certainty that it is time for contemporary fairy tales to be celebrated in a popular, literary collection. Fairy tales hold the secret to reading.

Kate Bernheimer

Once upon a time fairy tales were told to audiences of young and old alike. It is only in the last century that such tales were deemed fit only for small children, stripped of much of their original complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten and delight.

Terri Windling

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

For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.

Angela Carter

[Fairy tales] are like a journey to the woods and the many ways you can get lost. Some people say it's not a good idea to read fairy tales to anyone under the age of eight because they are brutal and raw. When I was a kid I often felt that kids's books were speaking down to me, but I never felt that way about fairy tales. They are bloody and scary, but so is life.

Alice Hoffman

I grew up with Bible stories, which are like fairy tales, because my father was a minister. We heard verses and prayers every day. I liked the gorier Bible stories. I did have a book of Chinese fairy tales. All the people except the elders looked like Italians. But we were not a family that had fiction books.

Amy Tan

Every kid loves fairy tales, stories of witches and giants and magicians. Then, when you get a little older you can't read fairy tales anymore.

Stan Lee

I love the stories of changelings and the thought that the Fey were these ancient, capricious creatures who were tricky and dangerous. I've always preferred the Brothers Grimm faery tales to the Disney fairy tales.

Julie Kagawa

Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.

Catherynne M. Valente

The Grimm collections were never intended for children. Not because kids were excluded, but because the division we make today of children's literature didn't exist then. The idea of protecting children from tales with violence didn't occur until the earlier part of the 19th century.

Jack Zipes

In the old fairy tales, often a 'moral' was tacked on at the end of the story - say, if a book was going to be marketed to young readers. And the morals don't really suit the stories at all, which makes them super weird - part of why I love the tradition so much. I do play with this, though I am more concerned with ethics than morals.

Kate Bernheimer

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.

Amy Tan

When fairy tales are written in the west, they're known as folklore. In the east, fairy tales are called religions.

Paul Henderson

Fantasy is, I believe, the great nourisher of imagination. To paraphrase Einstein on how to develop intelligence in young people: Read fairy tales. Then read more fairy tales.

Lloyd Alexander

I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.

Kate Bernheimer

A Quote by Terri Windling

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