1.
A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.
Marie Curie
A scientist in their research space is more than a technician: they are akin to a child encountering natural occurrences that astound them as if they were captivating tales.
2.
Atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the Light.
John Lennox
Atheism is a delusion for people intimidated by Illumination.
4.
Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.
Alexandre Dumas
5.
I'm an interpreter of stories. When I perform it's like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.
Nat King Cole
6.
There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
Stephen Hawking
7.
The Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story — and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.
J. R. R. Tolkien
8.
A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.
Gilbert Ryle
9.
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
Ralph Ellison
10.
I was always fascinated by fairy stories, fantasy, you know, demons, necromancers, gods and goddesses, everything that is out of our kin and out of our everyday world. I was always interested in enchantment and magicians and still am.
Christopher Lee
11.
Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories. Each one has a true, strange fact hidden in it, you know, which you can find if you look.
Diana Wynne Jones
12.
People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.
Edmond de Goncourt
13.
....This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.
Hendrik Willem van Loon
14.
The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.
J. R. R. Tolkien
15.
I think people should read fairy tales, because were hungry for a mythology that will speak to our fears.
Sandra Cisneros
16.
When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.
Salman Rushdie
17.
A child... who has learned from fairy stories to believe that what at first seemed a repulsive, threatening figure can magically change into a most helpful friend is ready to believe that a strange child whom he meets and fears may also be changed from a menace into a desirable companion.
Bruno Bettelheim
18.
I began to believe the fairy tales: You know, how we're all out there looking for our magical missing half.
Michael Bergin
19.
As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.
Tanith Lee
20.
Creationists reject Darwin's theory of evolution on the grounds that it is "just a theory". This is a valid criticism: evolution is indeed merely "a theory", albeit one with ten billion times more credence than the theory of creationism - although, to be fair, the theory of creationism is more than just a theory. It's also a fairy story. And children love fairy stories, which is presumably why so many creationists are keen to have their whimsical gibberish taught in schools.
Charlie Brooker
21.
To become a big movie star like Joan Crawford you need to wear blinders and pay single-minded attention to your career. Nobody paid attention to me, including me. I was the original Cinderella girl, looking for the happy ending in the fairy story. But my fantasy prince never came.
Evelyn Keyes
22.
There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
Andre Breton
23.
Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.
Robert Bly
24.
The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
25.
the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.
J. R. R. Tolkien
26.
Sometimes fairy stories may say best what's to be said.
C. S. Lewis
27.
Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.
Sonya Hartnett
28.
I was the original Cinderella girl, looking for the happy ending in the fairy story. But my fantasy prince never came.
Evelyn Keyes
29.
One of the things that turns me on the most is imagining new worlds, just as I did as a kid, when I listened to fairy stories and imagined what they looked like and what those worlds were like.
Nick Willing
30.
Hersesy is denying the word of God, and the word of God is much more reliably expressed in the natural world as it’s revealed through reason and science than in what I have heard described wonderfully as “the giant book of Jewish fairy stories".
Iain Banks
31.
Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.
Jeanette Winterson
32.
Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
John Fowles
33.
Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people's lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day.
Diana Wynne Jones