The Brothers Grimm Quotes

“Stories are masks of God.

That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.

Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.

Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.

So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.”
― Melanie Tem, The Man on the Ceiling

“As one might say, lying to one’s self is a hazardous pastime bent on breaking already fragile hearts . . . so let the damage begin.”
― Riley J. Perrie

“Then she was terribly angry, and took him up and threw him with all her might against the wall. "Now, thou wilt be quiet, odious frog!" said she.

—The fog king”
― various, Beauty and the Beast and Other Classic Fairy Tales