77 Quotes by Marina Warner

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

I avoid looking in the mirror.

I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.

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.

I shop online because I don't like to try things on in front of an alien mirror.

If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.

When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.

I do not think commodities are taken for granted. One of the convergences in time I noticed, and to me seemed very important, was the emergence of paper money. There had been permissionary notes, exchanging money by writing it, but there was no duplicated form of guaranteeing an exchange.

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.