The Arabian Nights Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'

Salman Rushdie

#3. 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

#4. Marvelous wonders don't have to happen of a sudden, the way they do in the Arabian Nights. They can also take a long time, like crystals growing, or minds changing, or leaves turning. The trick is to keep an eye peeled, so they don't slip by unappreciated.

Ken Kesey

#5. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairty tale from the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.

Henry David Thoreau

#6. I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.

Haruki Murakami

#7. It will be like a story from the Arabian Nights," he said. "Only an Oriental could have planned it. It does not belong to London fogs.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

#8. To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.

William Osler

#9. Such misplaced faith in a boy with a murderous past and a girl with treacherous intent.

Renee Ahdieh

#10. The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian Tales, without the merit of being entertaining, and the account of men living to eight and nine hundred years becomes as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of the Mythology.

Thomas Paine

#11. In this way he continued until he was fourteen years of age, when his extraordinary destiny took him by the hand, and led him, step by step, through adventures so wonderful that words can scarce describe them.

Arabian Nights

#12. You'll tell me a story and I'll spare you ? You think I don't see what you're doing ? I've read Arabian Nights."
"Call me Scheherazade, baby ! Actually, she's one tricksy bitch. Who, by the way, still owes me twenty gold pieces and a pound of sesame.

Kresley Cole