Top 36 Marina Warner Quotes
#1. I shop online because I don't like to try things on in front of an alien mirror.
Marina Warner
#2. 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
#3. The tripartite structure - so you remember the third brother, second brother, first brother, or the first dervish, second dervish, and third dervish. This is very like embroidering a cloth, as you have to know where you are with the knots.
Marina Warner
#4. 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, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.
Marina Warner
#5. 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
#6. 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 serious and ambitious. I am of the first generation that could go to Biba, wear miniskirts and get a degree.
Marina Warner
#7. Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, traders, merchants, travelers, with a wide range of personalities.
Marina Warner
#8. 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
#9. If you remember the pleasure of hearing a story many times, and you will remember that while you were listening you become three people. There is an incredible fusion: you become the storyteller, the protagonist, and you remember yourself listening to the story.
Marina Warner
#10. 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
#11. Mary Jane Clairmont, the second wife of William Godwin, and Mary Shelley's stepmother, had the idea of bringing out French fairy tales for children in an attempt to make some much needed money for the family (she has not been given her due by biographers, in my view).
Marina Warner
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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 shudder of pleasure and of fear.
Marina Warner
#17. 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
#18. The French Revolution printed money because they didn't have any, so they just printed it, and this was a revolutionary step which of course we are still reaping the huge consequences of today. It struck me that this was beginning to happen ... there had been scandals where shares had been printed.
Marina Warner
#19. Storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets.
Marina Warner
#20. The forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered.
Marina Warner
#21. I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.
Marina Warner
#22. Love can make you turn on yourself, and it can do harmful things to you. It's a deep lesson in human psychology, as with many of the stories. Anyways, that's just an example of one of the most wicked women in the Nights.
Marina Warner
#24. Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit.
Marina Warner
#25. I love titles and organizing chains of ideas. I like that very much.
Marina Warner
#26. 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
#27. I have many, many editions of the books, and they are all rather different. In the end, the one I used was the most recent French translation. French suits the tales well, and it's a beautiful translation. The Italian one is good as well ... English has fallen short.
Marina Warner
#28. The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.
Marina Warner
#29. The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days.
Marina Warner
#30. 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
#31. The seductive invitation of metamorphosis - of turning into something other - has continued to suffuse fantasies of identity; on the one hand holding out a way of escape from humanity, on the other annihilating the self.
Marina Warner
#32. a world in a grain of sand | And a heaven in a wild flower'.
Marina Warner
#33. Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.
Marina Warner
#34. Behind every book for young people and every global product of family entertainment, the hum of boardroom discussion about the politics of the work can be heard.
Marina Warner
#35. When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.
Marina Warner
#36. I used to retain information extremely fast, so perhaps it's hardening a bit and I don't take the impression as well as I used to. Instead of writing in free flight, I had to check on the stories all the time. So I have decided I better to do it while I am fresh!
Marina Warner
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