Maria Tatar > Quotes

“It is through beauty, poetry and visionary power that the world will be renewed.”
― Maria Tatar

“More effectively than any of the other tales, 'The Emperor's New Clothes' established Andersen's reputation as a man who created stories for children — not just in the sense of target audience, but also as beneficiaries of something extraordinary. The lesson embedded in it is so transparent that its title circulates in the form of proverbial wisdom about social hypocrisy. But more importantly, 'The Emperor's New Clothes' romanticizes children by investing them with the courage to challenge authority and to speak truth to power.”
― Maria Tatar

“Words have not just the astonishing capacity to banish boredom and create wonders. They also enable contact with the lives of others and with story worlds, arousing endless curiosity about ourselves and the places we inhabit.”
― Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood

“Magic happens when the wand of language strikes a stone and makes it melt, touches a spindle and turns it into gold, or taps a trunk and makes it fly. By drawing on a syntax of enchantment that conjures fluidity, ethereality, flimsiness, and transparency, writers turn solidity into resplendent airy lightness to produce miracles of linguistic transubstantiation.

What is the effect of that beauty? How do readers respond to words that create that beauty? In a world that has discredited that particular attribute and banished it from high art, beauty has nonetheless held on to its enlivening power in children's books. It draws readers in, then draws them to understand the fictional worlds it lights up.”
― Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood

“Storytelling draws on the magic of language to created Elsewheres. Writers use a linguistic sleight-of-hand to take an attribute, attach them to new objects, and create enchantment.”
― Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood

“Andersen himself believed that many of his finest stories were written after travels to Rome, Naples, Constantinople, and Athens in 1841. He returned to Copenhagen reinvigorated by the encounter with the 'Orient' and began inventing his own tales rather than relying on the folklore of his culture. Andersen believed that he had finally found his true voice, and 'The Snow Queen,' even if it does not mark a clean break with the earlier fairy tales, offers evidence of a more reflective style committed to forging new mythologies rather than producing lighthearted entertainments.”
― Maria Tatar

“Scheherazade may lack the mobility and appetites of male cultural heroes, but she transcends the narrow domestic space of the bedroom through her expansive narrative reach and embraces bold defiance as she sets about remaking the values of the culture she inhabits, using words alone. She not only arouses curiosity but also turns herself into a storytelling transvaluation machine, for she understands at the deepest level that words can change you. Behind her transformative art lurks the ruse of the disempowered, and Scheherazade, despite the physical constraints placed on her, uses language in ways that reveal what the philosopher J. L. Austin referred to as its “perlocutionary” power, its ability to persuade, teach, or inspire. Scheherazade operates at a level that is culturally productive and also biologically reproductive. Creative and procreative, she produces children with Shahriyar and also sets the stage in powerful ways for the literary progeny that spring from her story—the many female storytellers whom we will encounter in the chapters that follow.”
― Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1001 Faces

“I want to be the hero,” she announced.”
― Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1001 Faces

“Acts committed in the heat of passion as much as acts of heartfelt compassion have the power to disenchant”
― Maria Tatar, Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales About Animal Brides and Grooms from Around the World

“Claude Lévi-Strauss famously called mythmakers bricoleurs—experts in the art of tinkering, mending, and using what is close at hand to”
― Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1001 Faces

“As always, aesthetics and ethics dance a tango in dramas.”
― Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1001 Faces

“bricoleurs”
― Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1001 Faces

“At that, the old hag flew into such a rage she burst into pieces on the spot, and the princess with the long nose did the same right after her, and the whole pack of trolls right after that. At least I haven't heard a word about them since.”
― Maria Tatar, Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales About Animal Brides and Grooms from Around the World

“Writing, and creativity in general, had been the domain of “great men” and would stay there until women stormed the arena, using words as their weapons.4”
― Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1001 Faces