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Fairies

mythical being or legendary creature in European folklore

Fairies are mythical beings or legendary creatures, a form of spirit, often described as metaphysical, supernatural or preternatural. Fairies resemble various beings of other mythologies, though even folklore that uses the term fairy offers many definitions. Sometimes the term describes any magical creature, including goblins or gnomes: at other times, the term only describes a specific type of more ethereal creature. In modern usage, faries are usually depicted as tiny human-appearing creatures with wings and the ability to perform magic.

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
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together… ~ William Allingham

Quotes

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If you believe … clap your hands. J. M. Barrie
 
When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. ~ J. M. Barrie
 
It is not children only that one feeds with fairy tales. ~ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
 
We the globe can compass soon.
Swifter than the wand'ring moon. ~ William Shakespeare
 
Light as any wind that blows
So fleetly did she stir,
The flower, she touch'd on, dipt and rose,
And turned to look at her. ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  • Science seeks to explain everything—but maybe we don't want everything explained. We don't want all the magic to go out of life. We want to remain connected to the secret parts of our inner beings, to the ancient mysteries, and to the most distant outposts of the universe. We want to believe. And as long as we do, the fairies will remain.
    • Skye Alexander, Fairies: The Myths, Legends & Lore (2014)
  • 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 Poems (London: Chapman & Hall, 1850). In first American edition of Poems (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870), p. 30.
  • 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.
  • When you were a bird you knew the fairies pretty well, and you remember a good deal about them in your babyhood, which it is a great pity you can't write down, for gradually you forget, and I have heard of children who declared that they had never once seen a fairy. Very likely if they said this in the Kensington Gardens, they were standing looking at a fairy all the time. The reason they were cheated was that she pretended to be something else. This is one of their best tricks.
  • Do you believe in fairies? If you believe clap your hands.
    • J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1904); "Tinker Bell" thought she could get well again if children believed in fairies.
  • When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies.
    • J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1904)
    • Variants
    • You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
    • When a new baby laughs for the first time a new fairy is born, and as there are always new babies there are always new fairies. They live in nests on the tops of trees; and the mauve ones are boys and the white ones are girls, and the blue ones are just little sillies who are not sure what they are.
  • Whenever a child says "I don't believe in fairies" there's a little fairy somewhere that falls right down dead.
    • J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1904)
    • Variant: "There ought to be one fairy for every boy and girl."
      "Ought to be? Isn't there?"
      "No. You see children know such a lot now, they soon don't believe in fairies, and every time a child says, 'I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead."
    • J. M. Barrie, Peter & Wendy (1911), Ch. 3.
  • FAIRY, n. A creature, variously fashioned and endowed, that formerly inhabited the meadows and forests. It was nocturnal in its habits, and somewhat addicted to dancing and the theft of children. The fairies are now believed by naturalists to be extinct, though a clergyman of the Church of England saw three near Colchester as lately as 1855, while passing through a park after dining with the lord of the manor. The sight greatly staggered him, and he was so affected that his account of it was incoherent.
  • Bright Eyes, Light Eyes! Daughter of a Fay!
    I had not been a married wife a twelvemonth and a day,
    I had not nursed my little one a month upon my knee,
    When down among the blue bell banks rose elfins three times three:
    They griped me by the raven hair, I could not cry for fear,
    They put a hempen rope around my waist and dragged me here;
    They made me sit and give thee suck as mortal mothers can,
    Bright Eyes, Light Eyes! strange and weak and wan!
    • Robert Buchanan, The Fairy Foster Mother, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 253-54.
  • This is not the considered dogma of schoolmen or of sages in council, but the whirring utterance of a poet, and it is with some such answer that we must affirm our belief in the fairy world. For this belief […] is so inconsiderable that it will never harden into a creed; so tiny and humble a thing that the wise of this world have never tried to preserve it as a talisman or to use it as an artificial symbol of contention. So that it has been left from the beginning to grow free like the daisies, and children from the morning of time have woven it into happy coronals and into flower-chains.
    • Gertrude M. Faulding, Fairies (London: B. T. Batsford, 1913), pp. 1–2.
  • Faeries lead us astray to show us the way.
  • There are fairies at the bottom of our garden!
      It's not so very, very far away;
    You pass the gardener's shed and you just keep straight ahead—
      I do so hope they've really come to stay.[…]

    The King is very proud and very handsome,
      The Queen—now can you guess who that could be
    (She's a little girl all day, but at night she steals away)?
          Well—it's ME!

    • Rose Fyleman, "Fairies", first published in Punch (May 23, 1917); included the following year in her first collection, Fairies and Chimneys (1918).
  • Then take me on your knee, mother;
    And listen, mother of mine.
    A hundred fairies danced last night,
    And the harpers they were nine.
    • Mary Howitt, The Fairies of the Caldon Low, Stanza 5, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 253-54.
  • Nothing can be truer than fairy wisdom. It is as true as sunbeams.
    • Douglas Jerrold, Specimens of Jerrold's Wit, Fairy Tales, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 253-54.
  • Most nature-spirits dislike and avoid mankind, and we cannot wonder at it. To them man appears a ravaging demon, destroying and spoiling wherever he goes... He wantonly kills, often with awful tortures, all the beautiful creatures that they love to watch; he cuts down the trees, he tramples the grass, he plucks the flowers and casts them carelessly aside to die; he replaces all the lovely wild life of nature with his hideous bricks and mortar, and the fragrance of the flowers with the mephitic vapours of his chemicals and the all polluting smoke of his factories. Can we think it strange that the fairies should regard us with horror, and shrink away from us as we shrink from a poisonous reptile? p. 143
  • Nicht die Kinder bloss speist man mit Märchen ab.
  • It is for fear of the grown-up, or at least out of respect towards them, that a chapter must be given to fairies. If the children do not care very much for fairies, they must be made to care. "Who is to care if they do not? Who is to be properly childlike if they are not?"
    • Alice Meynell, Ch. V "Fairies", Childhood (London: B. T. Batsford, 1913), pp. 26–27.
  • It may well be doubted whether children are generally credulous.{…] For children do not believe in fairies a jot. I have just asked my youngest daughter whether she believed in them, and she said "Of course not—only I liked the stories." Fiction to children is fiction and not fact.
    • Alice Meynell, Ch. V "Fairies", Childhood (London: B. T. Batsford, 1913), p. 30.
  • The pretty game of calling on the children of the audience of "Peter Pan" to declare their faith in fairies seemed to me disastrous—a game of men and women at the expense of children, a cumbersome frolic at best and an artificial, a tyrannous use of the adult sense of sentimental humour against the helpless. I could with better conscience use my superior physical strength upon them than exploit them for love of my own condescension. (And yet Sir J. Barrie has written the most adorable "pretending" story ever written about a child.)

    No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put aside while they "pretend." That is their own word.[…] "Let's pretend," not "Let's believe." Their mother does not put "Let's pretend" into the child's mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception.

    • Alice Meynell, Ch. V "Fairies", Childhood (London: B. T. Batsford, 1913), pp. 32–33.
  • I took it for a faery vision
    Of some gay creatures of the element,
    That in the colours of the rainbow live,
    And play i' th' plighted clouds.
  • Or fairy elves,
    Whose midnight revels by a forest side
    Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
    Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon
    Sits arbitress, and nearer to the Earth
    Wheels her pale course; they, on their mirth and dance
    Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
    At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.
  • The dances ended, all the fairy train
    For pinks and daisies search'd the flow'ry plain.
    • Alexander Pope, January and May, line 624, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 253-54.
  • 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.
  • Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
    In a cowslip's bell I lie;
    There I couch when owls do cry.
    On the bat's back I do fly.
  • Her berth was of the wombe of morning dew
    And her conception of the joyous prime.
    • Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1589-96), Book III, Canto VI, Stanza 3.
  • But light as any wind that blows
    So fleetly did she stir,
    The flower, she touch'd on, dipt and rose,
    And turned to look at her.
    • Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Talking Oak, Stanza 33, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 253-54.
  • The weakness of the attack lies in its lack of discrimination. It is possible that psychic surgery is a hoax, that plants cannot really read our minds, that Kirlian photography (photographing the "life-aura" of living creatures) may depend on some simple electrical phenomenon. But to lump all of these together as if they were all on the same level of improbability shows a certain lack of discernment. The same applies to the list of "hoaxes." Rhine's careful research into extrasensory perception at Duke University is generally conceded to be serious and sincere, even by people who think his test conditions were too loose. The famous fairy photographs are quite probably a hoax, but no one has ever produced an atom of proof either way, and until someone does, no one can be quite as confident as the editors of Time seem to be. And Ted Serios has never at any time been exposed as a fraud — although obviously he might be. We see here a phenomena that we shall encounter again in relation to Geller: that when a scientist or a "rationalist" sets himself up as the defender of reason, he often treats logic with a disrespect that makes one wonder what side he is on.
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