Kate Bernheimer > Quotes

“Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.”
― Kate Bernheimer

“Beer bottles, whiskey bottles, brown glass, green. They fell to the lawn and I'd feel serene. Adam was king to my stilted queen.”
― Kate Bernheimer, The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold

“I have been transcribing those poems and considering how lucky we are to live longer than flowers, even if not much happens to us.”
― Kate Bernheimer, The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold

“Doll-less, invisible friend-less, finally more comfortable in fear than in gladness, Astrid began to live in her head. Or rather inside a small tunnel - a hole - in her head, through which she watched everything gaily depart. She nodded this head and pretended to listen. 'Bye-bye,' she would hear from within.”
― Kate Bernheimer, Horse, Flower, Bird

“All good animals have secret lives.”
― Kate Bernheimer, Horse, Flower, Bird

“The home in which you reside it not forever.”
― Kate Bernheimer, Horse, Flower, Bird

“Thankfully, the farmers understand my request that the children not be allowed to peer through the windows at me.
It would be alarming for them to see me with their dolls, to see me using the knife on their faces. There are some things children never should see.”
― Kate Bernheimer, The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold

“I know that human triumph is never fully redemptive.”
― Kate Bernheimer, Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales

“No longer could I root happily into my mother's company and find comfort in her rounded shape. There was no one to tell me the facts. How much nutrition to pull from the dirt? Would the beetles bring harm? And what of the worms? Friends, foe, or nevermind?”
― Kate Bernheimer, Horse, Flower, Bird

“What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine. —from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 Rainer Maria Rilke”
― Kate Bernheimer, xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths

“After being conditioned as a child to the lovely never-never land of magic, of fairy queens and virginal maidens, of little princes and their rosebushes, of poignant bears and Eeyore-ish donkeys, of life personalized, as the pagans loved it, of the magic wand, and the faultless illustrations—the beautiful dark-haired child (who was you) winging through the midnight sky on a star-path in her mother’s box of reels—of Griselda in her feather-cloak, walking barefoot with the Cuckoo in the lantern-lit world of nodding mandarins, of Delight in her flower garden with the slim-limbed flower sprites … all this I knew, and felt, and believed. All this was my life when I was young. To go from this to the world of “grown-up” reality … To feel the sexorgans develop and call loud to the flesh; to become aware of school, exams (the very words as unlovely as the sound of chalk shrilling on the blackboard), bread and butter, marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death, and self. What a pathetic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood. Not to be sentimental, as I sound, but why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life? To learn snide and smutty meanings of words you once loved, like “fairy.” —From The Journals of Sylvia Plath”
― Kate Bernheimer, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales

“As a kid, being with her was easy; it was the nearest to heaven I've ever been.”
― Kate Bernheimer, Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales

“Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps. Reading them often provides an uneasy sensation—a gnawing familiarity—that comforting yet supernatural awareness of living inside a story.”
― Kate Bernheimer

“The father washes his hands of his son, so the boy is forced to set out alone to try and find fear, hoping that by doing so he'll fit in, that finally he'll belong. That maybe once he can shudder, he'll be able to go home. That's a line that always got me, that part about the shudder and going home.”
― Kate Bernheimer, Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales

“Ogres bumbled, and erred, but their weaknesses were not hidden and this helped them, in the long run.”
― Kate Bernheimer, xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths

“Plain and simple, I hope, in a fairy tale way: in fairy tales it is often the humble to whom magic is revealed.”
― Kate Bernheimer, Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales

“Another gift is Pansy’s love. Bathed in that love, Lyle in turn is gentle with other kids, especially with kids uneasy under their bragging, kids really as frightened as rabbits when a hawk darkens their world. Lyle’s underweight presence steadies them, and he is sought after—but not exactly as a friend. He is more like Anansi the helpful spider of his favorite tales—a quiet ally who prefers his own company but skitters over to join you when you need him.”
― Kate Bernheimer, xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths

“Because he gets scared, he becomes human. Because, my grandmother said, love makes you human. And the loss of love is pain, is fear, is sadness. The boy's wife had hurt him. Before he had nothing to lose, and now, of course, he did.”
― Kate Bernheimer, Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales

“It was as if every other joy in the world existed only to give a distant glimpse of that one.”
― Kate Bernheimer, xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths

“Not comforting to see pain and death but just to see what she could not let herself imagine and therefore ruled her.”
― Kate Bernheimer, xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths

“We, in our less than divine wisdom but apparently quite divine powers, are now transforming the planet like an Olympian might have created an Ice Age, or a Titan might have thrown down an asteroid from the sky to kill off a bunch of dinosaurs.

We are the gods.

Our scientists have said so.”
― Kate Bernheimer, xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths

“All good fairy tales have meaning to many levels," Bruno Bettleheim observes in The Uses of Enchantment. "Only the child can know which meanings are significance to him at the moment.”
― Kate Bernheimer, Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales

“It was in this way that my idea of brothers began-that brothers were sweet and needed much saving.”
― Kate Bernheimer

“He knows that it happens in this world that you can change in such a way as to never again be complete, that you can lose parts of who you once were—and sometimes you’ll get better, but sometimes you’ll never be anything more than fractional: than who you once were, a few parts hollow. He knows that sometimes what’s missing isn’t somebody else.”
― Kate Bernheimer, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“So now she was wife to a king who would have let her burn, and queen of those who’d sent her to the fire. These were her people, this her life. There was little in it that he’d call love.”
― Kate Bernheimer, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“anything we refer to as “reality” in fiction is just a shared hallucination,”
― Kate Bernheimer, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“I know many writers who say that the memory of reading fairy tales is their first, and sometimes only, memory of rapture. I hope that this unpredictable, intense collection inspires you to read fairy tales-and then to read them again.”
― Kate Bernheimer, Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales

“And to hold something impossible in your hands, not just in your heart, was a rarity God afforded almost no one.”
― Kate Bernheimer, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“You have the hey to the library," he said. "Only be careful what you read.”
― Kate Bernheimer

“So the Giant. Maybe Jack had no particular giant in mind; maybe it was just a giant-sized hole in his dreams and desires that the big-G Giant later came forward to fill.”
― Kate Bernheimer