Jack D. Zipes Quotes

#1. Everything beautiful is golden and strewn with pearls. Even golden people live here. But misfortune is a dark power, a monstrous, cannibalistic giant, who is, however, vanquished, because a good woman, who happily knows how to avert disaster, stands ready to help.

Jack D. Zipes

#2. The literary fairy tale became an acceptable social symbolic form through which conventionalized motifs, characters, and plots were selected, composed, arranged, and rearranged to comment on the civilizing process and to keep alive the possibility of miraculous change and a sense of wonderment.

Jack D. Zipes

#3. Many bowdlerized versions indicated a Victorian-minded censorship, which feared that Little Red Riding Hood might some day break out, become a Bohemian, and live in the woods with the wolf.

Jack D. Zipes

#4. Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must invent or find the means through communication to satisfy as well as resolve conflicting desires and instincts.

Jack D. Zipes

#5. Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.

Jack D. Zipes

#6. The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.

Jack D. Zipes

#7. Alas for those girls who've refused the truth: The sweetest tongue has the sharpest tooth.

Jack D. Zipes

#8. In olden times, when wishing still helped...."
- The Frog King | The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

Jack D. Zipes

#9. Every day affords individual people moments when they can shake off everything that is false and can view things from their perspective.

Jack D. Zipes

#10. It was only as part of the civilizing process that storytelling developed within the aristocratic and bourgeois homes, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through governesses and nannies, and later in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries through mothers, who told bedtime stories.

Jack D. Zipes

#11. If there is one 'constant' in the structure and theme of the wonder tale, it is transformation.

Jack D. Zipes