In Defense of Fairy Tales

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."
--Albert Einstein

"Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality -- for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it wisely."
--Terri Windling

"Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale of all."
--Hans Christian Anderson

"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adults themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the mark of childhood and adolescence...When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
--C.S. Lewis

"Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's fingers."
--Hans Christian Anderson

"Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
--G.K. Chesterton