A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny's house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems.

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. from "The Lady of the Haunted House

And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can't handle their cash just like the rich can't, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way.

Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.

Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar