Marina Warner famous quotes

03-28-2025

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

#Heart #Journey #Humanity
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

#Gentleman #Special #World
When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.
-- Marina Warner

#Photographer #Young #Bookworms
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

#People #Cosmos #Culture
I shop online because I don't like to try things on in front of an alien mirror.
-- Marina Warner

#Mirrors #Trying #Aliens
I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.
-- Marina Warner

#School #Catholic
I avoid looking in the mirror.
-- Marina Warner

#Mirrors #Looking In The Mirror
Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.
-- Marina Warner

#Flow #Kind #Figures
Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called â€˜erotika pathemataâ€™ by the Greeks - tales of erotic suffering.
-- Marina Warner

#Romance #Greek #Suffering
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

#Spring #Opposites #Desire
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

#Essence #Males #Female
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

#Mother #Men #Maps
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

#Heart #Simple #Order
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

#Children #Years #Two
The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.
-- Marina Warner

#Pain #Vocabulary #Pleasure
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

#Odds #Teeth #Fairy Tale
The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due.
-- Marina Warner

#Lying #Character #Thinking
When virtue is pictured as innocence and innocence equated with childlikeness, the implication is obviously that knowledge and experience are no longer media of goodness, but have become in themselves contaminating. This is a very despairing outlook, in its way as black as Augustine's original sin, for it supposes that original goodness will in all likelihood be defiled...It surrenders the attempt to represent virtue in a mature phase.
-- Marina Warner

#Media #Black #Phases

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