QuoteProject
We have been poisoned by fairy tales.
Anais Nin
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote suggests that unrealistic narratives can distort our perception of reality.

Anais Nin's quote highlights the idea that fairy tales, often filled with idealized characters and situations, can lead to disillusionment and a skewed understanding of life. By being 'poisoned' by these tales, people may develop unrealistic expectations and romanticize experiences that are fundamentally more complicated and imperfect in reality.

Themes

Fairy TalesRealityExpectationsDisillusionmentNarratives

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about the effects of media on young adults, one might say, 'As Anais Nin pointed out, we have been poisoned by fairy tales.'

More from Anais Nin

The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anais NinRead
Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.
Anais NinRead
We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there.
Anais NinRead
The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.
Anais NinRead
But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.
Anais NinRead
I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.
Anais NinRead

Similar quotes

How oft, in nations gone corrupt, And by their own devices brought down to servitude, That man chooses bondage before liberty. Bondage with ease before strenuous liberty.
John MiltonRead
When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.
Steven PinkerRead
Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.
Emile M. CioranRead
We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God
Harry S. TrumanRead
Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner -- what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.
Rainer Maria RilkeRead
I am what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker - a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten.
Anne FrankRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.