Marina Warner quotes

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)
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. View quote
Marina Warner
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. View quote
Marina Warner
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. View quote
Marina Warner
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. View quote
Marina Warner
The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain. View quote
Marina Warner
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. View quote
Marina Warner
I avoid looking in the mirror. View quote
Marina Warner
I shop online because I don't like to try things on in front of an alien mirror. View quote
Marina Warner
When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm. View quote
Marina Warner
One of the achievements of our generation of feminists was to emancipate women from the division between being interested in clothes and appearance, and being serious and ambitious. I am of the first generation that could go to Biba, wear miniskirts and get a degree. (Marina Warner)
I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school. View quote
Marina Warner