Marina Warner Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

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.

Marina Warner
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
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.

Marina Warner
Fears trace a map of a society's values; we need fear to know who we are and what we do not want to be.

Marina Warner
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.

Marina Warner
A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.

Marina Warner
The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul—lust.

Marina Warner
Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called 'erotika pathemata' by the Greeks - tales of erotic suffering.

Marina Warner
Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

Marina Warner
Although Mary cannot be a model for the New Woman, a goddess is better than no goddess at all, for the sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentleman'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.

Marina Warner
All the soppy talk about the inner child has not laid to rest deep fantasies about the inner ogre.

Marina Warner