Marina Warner Quotes

17 quotes in 309 categories

• The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.
• 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…
• Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple,…
• 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…
• 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.
• Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the…
• Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called ‘erotika pathemata’ by the Greeks - tales of erotic suffering.
• Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.
• I avoid looking in the mirror.
• I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.
• I shop online because I don't like to try things on in front of an alien mirror.
• 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…
• When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.
• 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,…
• The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not…
• 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…
• One of the achievements of our generation of feminists was to emancipate women from the division between being interested in clothes and appearance, and being…

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