Many of the enchanted things in the book are lamps, carpets, sofas, gems, brass rings. It is a … - Marina Warner

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I think the world is full of evil people. I think in some ways we're in more danger now than before.

Marina Warner

Many of the enchanted things in the book are lamps, carpets, sofas, gems, brass rings. It is a rather different landscape than the fairy tale landscape of the West. Though we have interiors and palaces, we don't have bustling cities, and there isn't the emphasis on the artisan making things. The ambiance from which they were written was an entirely different one. The Arabian Nights comes out of a huge world of markets and trade. Cairo, Basra, Damascus: trades and skills.

Book, Night, Skills, Bustling, Markets, Written

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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