Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect … - Marina Warner

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I fill my life with a lot of 'busyness' in between jobs. Then I work very hard. Some of it is quite unhealthy. It's compulsive. I don't know what to do about it. I'm a little old to change.

Marina Warner

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.

Night, Class, Cities, Stories, Traditional, Based

Same Author Quotes

I have always argued that we can't live by or be made to exist outside of mythology, and that every group and nation has, possibly unacknowledged to themselves, some myths by which they live. It remains important to revisit them, understand them and possibly retell them - or at least own up to them - and then it becomes possible to move something. If it's obscure or invisible to you, you can't budge those understandings.

Budge, Important, Invisible, Moving, Myths, Understanding

The Grimm brothers always said that their informants were women, which is possibly not true, women of the people. There is the constant evocation of women's voices, in the collecting and arrangement of these stories, and yet the message of so many of them is incredibly misogynist. I was very puzzled by that, and that book explores that contradiction.

Book, Brother, Grimm, Misogynist, Voice, Women

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.

Fairy, Manuals, Maps, Men, Mother

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.

Ghouls, Mind, Night, Stories, Storyteller

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.

Essence, Female, Males, Mover, Passio