Quotes About Folklore

History is the distillation of rumour.

I'm very at home working with mythology.

What Grimm fairy tale featured apiarian morphing humans?

Ah, that's just sean nós singing and dancing. Something to do around the pub of an evening.

The reason people use a crucifix against vampires is that vampires are allergic to bull shit.

The moment there is imagination there is myth

The Orenda is a powerful story from history, folklore and the imagination, based on the universality of human cruelty, superstition and perseverance. Wonderful writing.

Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.

To take a single and salient instance, to study the folk-epos of Russia, alive in the mouths of the people up to and beyond the time of Peter the Great, is to look at Homer with new and wider opened eyes.

We have seen (p. 71) that, out of the puppet or the May Queen, actually perceived year after year there arose a remembrance, a mental image, an imagined Tree Spirit, or "Summer," or Death, a thing never actually seen but conceived.

I've heard them lilting, at the ewe milking,Lasses a' lilting, before dawn of day;But now they are moaning, on ilka green loaning;The flowers of the forest are a' wede away.

Folklore is the perfect second skin. From under its hide, we can see all the shimmering, shadowy uncertainties of the world.

We who work in fantasy today take the threads from all the story tellers of the past. From the ancient, many colored threads we work to weave a new cloth. If the landscape, the characters, and the creatures here call up the old tales told the beside the fire, when stories went from mouth to ear instead of page to eye then I have woven well and the dreamer continues to dream.

a fundamental rule of journalism, which is to tell a story and stick to it. The narratives of journalism (significantly called "stories"), like those of mythology and folklore, derive their power from their firm, undeviating sympathies and antipathies. Cinderella must remain good and the stepsisters bad. "Second stepsister not so bad after all" is not a good story.

Where is it? I asked, willing him to tell me. He laughed suddenly, and I could hear the full-throated, grating sound of the white bear's laughter in it. East of the sun and west of the moon, he said.

You can give me any of Shakespeare's plays and I'll tell you a parallel African folktale.

A lot of my stories are inspired by Japanese folklore or literature or movies: I've done stories based on Kabuki and Noh plays, and on Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' movies.

I figure if someone calls something a 'Draugr,' people can figure out that it's a monster or some sort of mythic creature, and if they want to know more, there's plenty of information out there about those mythic creatures.

All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived.

I swear to God I was freaked out about the Aswang when I was a kid in the Philippines.

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

Pliny reports solemnly, "It is said that if a person is rubbed with asparagus beaten up in oil, he will never be stung by bees.

Lucky Devon Pixies, said the sign. I'm a lucky Devon pixie, from the legend old and true, Kiss me once and turn me twice and I'll bring luck to you. The pixies were silver charms in pretty little boxes with the verse on the lid,

Farewell, rewards and fairies,Good housewives now may say.