“I suppose you love me, in your way,” I said to him one night close to dawn when we lay on the narrow bed. “And how else should I love you—in your way?” he asked. I am still thinking about that.
— Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
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It occurs to me as I fight so hard with myself that these cruel and persistent voices are the echoes of trauma from the times when people treated me like I am now treating myself. And that, perhaps, it is possible to close an inner door and shut out voices that are not mine. In the last light of a long day, I sit on a chair on my porch and watch the sky drain colors down and out and I realize I want to hear my voice and only mine. Not the voice of my voice within a cacophony of old pains. Just mine, now.
— Jelly Slate, Little Weirds
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The literary fairy tale mixed hagiography with romance to pioneer a new heroine, a proto-romantic champion of the truth of the imagination and the holiness of the heart’s affections. But this kind of tale, which D’Aulnoy and L’Heritier perfected in the late seventeenth century, no longer issued any kind of challenge to the established code of femininity in the nineteenth-century nursery. By forgetting that fairy tales interact with social circumstances, we miss seeing how the copybook blonde princess becomes instead a stick with which to beat young women, as in ‘Blonda’. The conventions of fairy tale, including the shining beauty and goodness of the heroine, become cliches, used by moralists to enforce discipline (and appearance) on growing girls. Good behaviour earns a reward: beauty, sex appeal, the very desirability the stories used to dramatize as so painful and problematic.
— Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
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Gone is your peace of mind. As an animal you were alone and happy. Your soul knew nothing of hate or love. Your animal habits limited but also protected you!
— Panna a Netvor
The unicorn was weary of human beings. Watching her companions as they slept, seeing the shadows of their dreams scurry over their faces, she would feel herself bending under the heaviness of knowing their names. Then she would run until morning to ease the ache: swifter than rain, swift as loss, racing to catch up with the time when she had known nothing at all but the sweetness of being herself.
— The Last Unicorn
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Eternity
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.— William Blake (1757 - 1827)