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The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.

Marina Warner

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Marina Warner
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: November 9
Historian
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Marina Sarah Warner
Dame Marina Sarah Warner
Fairy
Tales
Gritted
Appear
Fantastical
Teeth
Vehicles
Less
Expressing
Hope
Realism
Vehicle
Odds

More quotes by Marina Warner

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When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.
Marina Warner
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The tales are quite hard to remember and I found that going back to it between bouts of writing fiction, I was having to retrace my steps quite a lot, because the stories are very intricate and the material is elusive, and possibly with age, my memory is not as malleable as it used to be.
Marina Warner
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A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
Marina Warner
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Scheherazade, of course, was always in the back of my mind, because she's also a storyteller identified as female who tells a lot of anti-female stories. There's a parade in The Arabian Nights of sorceresses, adulteresses, ghouls, sirens, harridans.
Marina Warner
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The technique of the book and the technique carried by the figure of Scheherazade is one of opening the Sultan's mind. He's emblematic of the ignorant person: the ignorant, lock-in, raging man who wants to kill all he doesn't understand. The model of the book is the extraordinary, very-large, Mirror of Princes.
Marina Warner
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I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.
Marina Warner
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The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul--lust.
Marina Warner
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If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.
Marina Warner
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The stories are most often about justice. In her stories, those who commit injustice, or act tyrannically, come to no good. They are punished.
Marina Warner
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I consider it as a foreshadowing of modernity in many different respects, and the consistency of character is interesting to the emerging modern psychology. The emphasis on dream knowledge relates quite deeply to psychoanalysis, although I suppose psychoanalysis wouldn't like to say that... Freud was always saying he was a scientist.
Marina Warner
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The model of the educational Kalila Wa-Dimna. These are books of instruction to rulers and humans. The stories unfold a range of human psychology, a vast range of human psychology. The Sultan is being moved from his narrow and bigoted position into a wider, more subtle, more nuanced understanding of human experiences.
Marina Warner
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I do not think commodities are taken for granted. One of the convergences in time I noticed, and to me seemed very important, was the emergence of paper money. There had been permissionary notes, exchanging money by writing it, but there was no duplicated form of guaranteeing an exchange.
Marina Warner
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It seemed to me to be a parable of the exchange of goods, rather Marxist in some ways, in the new world of global forces. What the forgers do is write the brand name to try and change it, and it works! Loads of people buy fake Prada handbags, or Chanel sunglasses they've been changed. They have been truly, really changed.
Marina Warner
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Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.
Marina Warner
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One of the things I try to do is try to make repetitions, rhymes, and mirrorings across the subject matter of my own books so that the chapter titles and the epigraphs and pictures all kind of form a tapestry. In this book, I retell fifteen of the stories. You have the critical frame, and then you have these rosettes like the motif in a carpet.
Marina Warner
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There is a theory, that I rather subscribe to. The frame story implies that if he doesn't change, she will kill him. It's all very complex and subtle. The story is about a woman who persuades a man in power to a different temper and attitude, and so it is about women's wiles, what women will get up to. She has a plan, she has a scheme.
Marina Warner
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The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.
Marina Warner
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Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.
Marina Warner
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There is humanist enterprise of the book, and amongst that there are many, many stories. And that is why at the end, when he says that the stories are so illuminating that they must be engraved and encased in gold and put in the palace library, the people who compile the book are telling us that this is a collection of human wisdom.
Marina Warner