Marina Warner

Marina Warner in 2015

Dame Marina Sarah Warner CBE FBA (born 9 November 1946) is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer.

Quotes

• 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.
  • Alone of All Her Sex (London: Picador, [1976] 1985) p. 338.

• 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.
  • Joan of Arc (Harmondsworth, Penguin, [1981] 1983) p. 262.

• 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.
  • Joan of Arc (Harmondsworth, Penguin, [1981] 1983) p. 263.

• 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.
  • Wonder Tales (Oxford: OUP, 2004) p. 3.

• Regarding Salman Rushdie, the official reason given was that speaking up for the rights of a writer to free expression would offend some of our members and Fellows and that the RSL is not a political body [...] This attitude produces the odd situation that one of the few places in the UK where a writer can’t express their views is their own Society.
  • "Salman Rushdie vs the 'offended' youth – inside the Royal Society of Literature’s civil war", The Telegraph (10 February 2024).
  • On the controversy over the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) responses to the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie in August 2022. The RSL's president Bernardine Evaristo, in an article for The Guardian, had written the RSL "cannot take sides in writers' controversies and issues, but must remain impartial". Rushdie, on X/Twitter wondered if the RSL "is 'impartial’ about attempted murder? (Asking for a friend.)"