Jack D. Zipes > Quotes

“Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.”
― Jack Zipes

“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 Zipes

“Alas for those girls who've refused the truth: The sweetest tongue has the sharpest tooth.”
― Jack Zipes, Little Red Riding Hood and Other Classic French Fairy Tales

“If there is one ‘constant’ in the structure and theme of the wonder tale, it is transformation.”
― Jack Zipes, The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales

“Inevitably they find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always large, immense, great and mysterious. No one ever gains power over the forest, but the forest posses the power to change lives and alter destinies.”
― Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World

“In olden times, when wishing still helped....”
- The Frog King | The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm”
― Jack Zipes, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

“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 Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre

“Every day affords individual people moments when they can shake off everything that is false and can view things from their perspective.”
― Jack Zipes, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

“It has generally been assumed that fairy tales were first created for children and are largely the domain of children. But nothing could be further from the truth.

From the very beginning, thousands of years ago, when tales were told to create communal bonds in face of the inexplicable forces of nature, to the present, when fairy tales are written and told to provide hope in a world seemingly on the brink of catastrophe, mature men and women have been the creators and cultivators of the fairy tale tradition. When introduced to fairy tales, children welcome them mainly because they nurture their great desire for change and independence. On the whole, the literary fairy tale has become an established genre within a process of Western civilization that cuts across all ages. Even though numerous critics and shamans have mystified and misinterpreted the fairy tale because of their spiritual quest for universal archetypes or their need to save the world through therapy, both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate 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 Zipes, Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture

“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 Zipes, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

“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 Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood

“If someone loses a key and then finds it again, which key does one keep, the old or the new?
The queen replied; 'Certainly the old one.”
― Jack Zipes, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

“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 Zipes, Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture

“Over the last three centuries our historical reception of folk and fairy tales has been so negatively twisted by aesthetic norms, educational standards and market conditions that we can no longer distinguish folk tales from fairy tales nor recognize that the impact of these narratives stems from their imaginative grasp and symbolic depiction of social realities. Folk and fairy tales are generally confused with one another and taken as make-believe stories with no direct reference to a particular community or historical tradition. Their own specific ideology and aesthetics are rarely seen in the light of a diachronic historical development which has great bearing on our cultural self-understanding.”
― Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk & Fairy Tales

“Groups of children gathered around them and gave them flowers and placed colored ribbons at their feet. After they were blessed at the wedding, they had a merry celebration, but the false mother and false bride had to leave.
And the lips are still warm on the last person who told this tale.
-The Children Of The Two Kings”
― Jack Zipes, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

“As the literary fairy tale spread in France to every age group and every social class, it began to serve different functions, depending on the writer's interests. It represented the glory and ideology of the French aristocracy. It provided a symbolic critique, with utopian connotations, of the aristocratic hierarchy, largely within the aristocracy itself and from the female viewpoint. It introduced the norms and values of the bourgeois civilizing process as more reasonable and egalitarian than the feudal code. As a divertissement for the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the fairy tale diverted the attention of listeners/readers from the serious sociopolitical problems of the times, compensating for the deprivations that the upper classes perceived themselves to be suffering. There was also an element of self-parody, revealing the ridiculous notions in previous fairy tales and representing another aspect of court society to itself; such parodies can be seen in Jacques Cazotte's "A Thousand and One Follies" (1746), Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "The Queen Fantasque" (1758), and Voltaire's "The White Bull" (1774). Finally, fairy tales with clear didactic and moral lessons were approved as reading matter to serve as a subtle, more pleasurable means of initiating children into the class rituals and customs that reinforced the status quo.”
― Jack Zipes, Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture

“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 Zipes, Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture

“Ultimately, the definition of both the wonder tale and the fairy tale, which derives from it, depends on the manner in which a narrator/author arranges known functions of a tale aesthetically and ideologically to induce wonder and then transmits the tale as a whole according to customary usage of a society in a given historical period. The first stage for the literary fairy tale involved a kind of class and perhaps even gender appropriation. The voices of the nonliterate tellers were submerged, and since women in most cases were not allowed to be scribes, the tales were scripted according to male dictates or fantasies, even though they may have been told by women. Put crudely, it could be said that the literary appropriation of the oral wonder tales served the hegemonic interests of males within the upper classes of particular communities and societies, and to a great extent this is true. However, such a statement must be qualified, for the writing down of the tales also preserved a great deal of the value system of those deprived of power. And the more the literary fairy tale was cultivated and developed, the more it became individualized and varied by intellectuals and artists, who often sympathized with those society marginalized or were marginalized themselves. The literary fairy tale allowed for new possibilities of subversion in the written word and in print, and therefore it was always looked upon with misgivings by the governing authorities in the civilization process.”
― Jack Zipes, Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture

“Since these wonder tales have been with us for thousands of years and have undergone so many different changes in the oral tradition, it is difficult to determine the ideological intention of the narrator, and when we disregard the narrator's intention, it is often difficult to reconstruct (and/or deconstruct) the ideological meaning of a tale. In the last analysis, even if we cannot establish whether a wonder tale is ideologically conservative, sexist, progressive, emancipatory, etc., it is the celebration of wonder that constitutes its major appeal. No matter what the plot may be, this type of tale calls forth our capacity as readers and potential transmitters of its signs and meanings to wonder. We do not want to know the exact resolution, the "happily ever after," of a tale - that is, what it is actually like. We do not want to name God, gods, goddesses, or fairies, who will forever remain mysterious and omnipotent. We do not want to form graven images. We do not want utopia designated for us. We want to remain curious, startled, provoked, mystified, and uplifted. We want to glare, gaze, gawk, behold, and stare. We want to be given opportunities to change, and ultimately we want to be told that we can become kings and queens, or lords of our own destinies. We remember wonder tales and fairy tales to keep our sense of wonderment alive and to nurture our hope that we can seize possibilities and opportunities to transform ourselves and our worlds.”
― Jack Zipes, Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture

“Anyway, since the cat prepared and cooked the meal. I've lost my desire to eat it.”
― Jack Zipes (translator), John B. Gruelle (illustrator)

“Then I saw two greyhounds dragging a mill out of the water, and an old-worn-out horse stood there and said it was all right. And in the courtyard there were four horses threshing grain with all their might, and two goats were heating the stove, and a red cow shoved the bread into the oven. Then a chicken crowed, 'Cock-a-doodle doo! The tale is done, cock-a-doodle-doo!'
-The Tale About The Land of Cockaigne”
― Jack Zipes (translator), John B. Gruelle (illustrator)

“The secret of "Bluebeard" is that there is no secret.”
― Jack D. Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre