Top 30 Marina Warner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.”

— Marina Warner

2. “Aarne-Thompson-Uther index.”

— Marina Warner

3. “Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called ‘erotika pathemata’ by the Greeks – tales of erotic suffering.”

— Marina Warner

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4. “Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.”

— Marina Warner

5. “Scheherazade, of course, was always in the back of my mind, because she’s also a storyteller identified as female who tells a lot of anti-female stories. There’s a parade in The Arabian Nights of sorceresses, adulteresses, ghouls, sirens, harridans.”

— Marina Warner

6. “A society that doesn’t know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.”

— Marina Warner

7. “Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.”

— Marina Warner

8. “Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.”

— Marina Warner

9. “The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul – lust.”

— Marina Warner

10. “The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.”

— Marina Warner

11. “Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.”

— Marina Warner

12. “When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.”

— Marina Warner

13. “The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.”

— Marina Warner

14. “The forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered.”

— Marina Warner

15. “I love titles and organizing chains of ideas. I like that very much.”

— Marina Warner

16. “I shop online because I don’t like to try things on in front of an alien mirror.”

— Marina Warner

17. “I avoid looking in the mirror.”

— Marina Warner

18. “I do not think commodities are taken for granted. One of the convergences in time I noticed, and to me seemed very important, was the emergence of paper money. There had been permissionary notes, exchanging money by writing it, but there was no duplicated form of guaranteeing an exchange.”

— Marina Warner

19. “It’s a long time ago that I lost my faith in Mary, a long time since she was the fulcrum of the scheme of salvation I then believed in, alongside Jesus the chief redeemer. But I find that the symbolism of mercy and love which her figure has traditionally expressed has migrated and now shapes secular imagery and events; Catholic worship and moral teaching no longer monopolize it or control its significance.”

— Marina Warner

20. “Storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets.”

— Marina Warner

21. “If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.”

— Marina Warner

22. “The tripartite structure – so you remember the third brother, second brother, first brother, or the first dervish, second dervish, and third dervish. This is very like embroidering a cloth, as you have to know where you are with the knots.”

— Marina Warner

23. “Behind every book for young people and every global product of family entertainment, the hum of boardroom discussion about the politics of the work can be heard.”

— Marina Warner

24. “Theories about world literature, of which fairy tale is a fundamental part, emphasize the porousness of borders, geographical and inguistic: no frontiercan keep a good story from roaming. It will travel, and travel far, and travel back again in a different guise, a changed mood, and, above all, a new meaning.”

— Marina Warner

25. “The Other Worlds which fairy tales explore open a way for writers and storytellers to speak in Other terms, especially when the native inhabitants of the imaginary places do not belong to an established living faith and therefore do not command belief or repudiation. The tongue can be very free when it is speaking outside the jurisdiction of religion.”

— Marina Warner

26. “The stories are most often about justice. In her stories, those who commit injustice, or act tyrannically, come to no good. They are punished.”

— Marina Warner

27. “I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.”

— Marina Warner

28. “Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, traders, merchants, travelers, with a wide range of personalities.”

— Marina Warner

29. “Love can make you turn on yourself, and it can do harmful things to you. It’s a deep lesson in human psychology, as with many of the stories. Anyways, that’s just an example of one of the most wicked women in the Nights.”

— Marina Warner

30. “The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen’s club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days.”

— Marina Warner

31. “I used to retain information extremely fast, so perhaps it’s hardening a bit and I don’t take the impression as well as I used to. Instead of writing in free flight, I had to check on the stories all the time. So I have decided I better to do it while I am fresh!”

— Marina Warner

32. “The tales are quite hard to remember and I found that going back to it between bouts of writing fiction, I was having to retrace my steps quite a lot, because the stories are very intricate and the material is elusive, and possibly with age, my memory is not as malleable as it used to be.”

— Marina Warner

33. “Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit.”

— Marina Warner

34. “Above all, love must be freely given, by mutual consent on both sides, through the exercise of free will. Because it is thus freely chosen, it is an act of humanity and civilisation, neither a daemonic possession such as hurled Dido upon her funeral pyre or Medea upon her children, not the base stirrings of concupiscence.”

— Marina Warner