My highlights:
There are dungeons in fairyland for the overbold.
In that land a human may (perhaps) count themself fortunate to have wandered, but its very riches and strangeness make dumb the traveler who would report it. And while they are there it is dangerous for them to ask too many questions, lest the gates shut and the keys be lost.
The fairy gold too often turns to withered leaves when it is brought away. You will receive my withered leaves.
It is human who is in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural. Such is their doom. The trouble with the real folk of fairy is that they do not always look like what they are.
Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves mortal humans, when we are enchanted.
Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words, for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. The magic of Fairie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. Another is to hold communion with other living things.
It is often reported of fairies that they are cheaters of humans by “fantasy”. Such trickeries happen inside tales in which the fairies are not themselves illusions.
The magical understanding by humans of the proper languages of birds and beasts and trees, that is much nearer to the true purposes of Fairie.
There are prohibitions in fairyland (as probably, there are throughout the universe on every plane and every dimension).
The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. How powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into swift water. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven and read from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes.
In such “fantasy” new form is made. Faerie begins; human becomes a subcreator. An essential power of Faerie is thus the power of making immediately effective by the will the visions of “fantasy”. Not all are beautiful or even wholesome, not at any rate the fantasies of fallen Humans.
“He who would enter into the Kingdom of Faerie should have the heart of a little child”. For that possession is necessary to all high adventure, into kingdoms both less and far greater than Faerie. But humility and innocence – these things “the heart of a child” must mean in such a context – do not necessarily imply an uncritical wonder, nor indeed an uncritical tenderness.
Fairie stories offer also Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation, all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older people.
Imagination: the mental power of image making.
Art: the operative link between imagination and the final result, subcreation.
Fantasy: images of things that are not only “not actually present” but which are indeed not to be found in our primary world at all, or are generally believed not to be found there.
Creative fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not slavery to it.
Recovery, which include return and renewal of health, is a regaining of a clear view. Seeing things as we are meant to see them – as things apart from ourselves.
Fairy stories deal largely or mainly with simple or fundamental things untouched by fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting. For the story-maker who allows himself to be “free with” Nature can be her lover not her slave. It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of words, and the wonder of the things such as stone and wood, and iron, tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.
Why should human be scorned if, finding themself in prison, they try to get out and go home? From wildness of my heart I cannot exclude the question whether railway-engineers, if they had been brought up on more fantasy, might not have done better with all their abundant means than they commonly do.
There are other things more grim and terrible to fly from than the noise, stench, ruthlessness, and extravagance of the internal combustion engine. There are hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death. There are ancient limitations from which fairy-stories offer a sort of escape, and old ambitions and desires to which they offer a kind of satisfaction and consolation. Some are pardonable weaknesses or curiosities such as the desire to visit the deep sea free as a fish; or the longing for the noiseless, gracious, economical flight of a bird.
There are profounder wishes: such as the desire to converse with other living things. This is the root of the unrecorded past, an alleged absence of the sense of separation of ourselves from beasts. A vivid sense of that separation is very ancient; but also a sense that it was a severance: a strange fate and guilt lies on us.
Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert all complete fairy stories must have it. I will call it Eucatastrophe, the good catastrophe, the sudden joyus “turn”: this joy is not essentially “escapist” nor “fugitive”. It is a sudden and miraculous grace. It denies (in the face of much evidence) universal final defeat.