quotations about fairies
This is the fairy-land; O spite of spites!
We talk with goblins, owls and sprites.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Comedy of Errors
The Land of Fairy, also called Elfland, has characteristics of the land of the dead. Time is altered so that a day in human life might stretch into years in fairyland. There is no day or night but a perpetual twilight.
ROSEMARY GUILEY
The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy
Do not think the fairies are always little. Everything is capricious about them, even their size. They seem to take what size or shape pleases them.
W. B. YEATS
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
You just have to pay attention. If you don't, you'll miss them, or see something else--something you expected to see rather than what was really there. Faerie voices become just the wind, a bodach ... scurrying across the street becomes just a piece of litter caught in the backwash of a bus.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
Nothing can be truer than fairy wisdom. It is as true as sunbeams.
DOUGLAS JERROLD
Specimens of Douglas Jerrold's Wit
We must remember that the whole business of seeing fairies is a delicate operation at best. The power to see requires conditions of quiet and peace; and then, fairies are themselves quite as shy as wild creatures and have to be tamed and attracted.
DORA VAN GELDER KUNZ
The Real World of Fairies: A First-Person Account
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the disheveled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Land of Heart's Desire
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together,
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather!
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
The Fairies
In fact, fairies are part of a great evolutionary line that parallels the human. It starts, as the human line does, with some exceedingly primitive forms and rises up through the fairies (who are themselves at various stages of evolution) and has as its highest beings those that are traditionally called "angels" or "devas."
DORA VAN GELDER KUNZ
The Real World of Fairies: A First-Person Account
When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
J.M. BARRIE
Peter Pan
While hobgoblins are rather ugly, these fairies are actually helpful with household chores.
SHERI A. JOHNSON
The Girl's Guide to Fairies
Fairy folk a-listening
Hear the seed sprout in the spring,
And for music to their dance
Hear the hedgerows wake from trance,
Sap that trembles into buds
Sending little rhythmic floods
Of fairy sound in fairy ears.
Thus all beauty that appears
Has birth as sound to finer sense
And lighter-clad intelligence.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
No sooner had the words passed his lips than he was taken up and whisked into the moat with prodigious force; and the fairies came crowding round about him with great anger, screeching and screaming and roaring out, "Who spoiled our tune? Who spoiled our tune?"
W. B. YEATS
"The Legend of Knockgrafton", Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing known for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children.
J. M. BARRIE
The Little White Bird
People who have had fairy encounters often speak of the opalescent, light-filled quality of fairies. Their luminescent aspect gives rise to the name "the Shining Ones."
SIRONA KNIGHT
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Elves And Fairies
This yearning for their friendship and for the mere knowledge that they exist has its root in the fact that the fairies are there, silent and unseen to most people, yet close at hand--tapping, as it were, with elfin hands on the thin shell between the two worlds.
DORA VAN GELDER KUNZ
The Real World of Fairies: A First-Person Account
Come away, O human child!
To the woods and waters wild
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
W. B. YEATS
"The Stolen Child", Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
Pale Thing, Frail Thing! dumb and weak and thin,
Altho' thou ne'er dost utter sigh thou'rt shadow'd with a sin;
Thy minnie scorns to suckle thee, thy minnie is an elf,
Upon a bed of rose's-leaves she lies and fans herself;
And though my heart is aching so for one afar from me,
I often look into thy face and drop a tear for thee,
And I am but a peasant born, a lowly cotter's wife,
Pale Thing, Frail Thing! sucking at my life!
ROBERT BUCHANAN
"The Faery Foster-Mother"
Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time.
J. M. BARRIE
Peter Pan
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the forefinger of an alderman.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet