Quotes About Folktales

The myths and folktales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's own present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure.

Growing up as a Brit, Arthur and Merlin and Camelot, and just the idea of it, is embedded in the culture and in your soul, growing up. King Arthur is alongside Robin Hood, as those great British folk tales, myths and icons.

This book was made possible by the letter "ø." Also the letter "æ." The first time I saw them, I fell in love and just had to learn the language they belonged to. That language turned out to be Norwegian, with its rich history of folk tales about trolls and polar bears and clever young lads and lasses out to make their fortune. I only hope that I didn't offend my Danish blacksmith forbears by choosing to study Norwegian instead of Danish in college.

The Celtic folk-tales have been collected while the practice of story-telling is still in full vigour, though there is every sign that its term of life is already numbered.

There was an old womanLived under a hill;And if she's not gone,She lives there still.

It has nothing to do with rank. Men like them never have power. They're riders. Much later the Americans turned the rider into a cowboy, but he's much older than America. He's the man in folktales who comes to take you away on his horse. Not to his palace; he doesn't have one. He lives in a tent in the forest. He's never learnt to count— If he sells clothes in a street market, I'd have thought he could count! Prices, yes, consequences, no.

I have a better internal and intuitive understanding of folklore and myth than science and technology, so in that way fantasy is easier.

'A Court of Thorns and Roses' was actually inspired by three of my all-time-favorite fairy/folktales: 'Beauty and the Beast,' 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' and 'Tam Lin.' I got the kernel of inspiration by wondering: 'What if 'Beauty' was a huntress?'

I have a better internal and intuitive understanding of folklore and myth than science and technology, so in that way fantasy is easier.

While writing 'Cold Mountain,' I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic.

Tons of folktales have to do with hares and witches. Basically, witches all over Europe turn into hares and are able to do malevolent things in the form of a hare. It goes back to the great god Pan. Pan is, if we're going to do archetypal projections, related to the Christian Satan, but as a child, Pan was wrapped in a hare's hide.

Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.

Ammachi. Like the earth-goddess in the folktales, she was not to be disturbed from her tranquillity. To do so would have been the cause of a catastrophic earthquake. In order to minimize interference by either Ammachi or Janaki, we had developed and refined a system of handling conflict and settling disputes ourselves. Two things formed the framework of this system: territoriality and leadership.

Akbar and Birbal stories have an instant connect with people of all ages.

History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.

The southern Chinese are a mixture of the Han, or northern Chinese, and the local tribes, some of which allowed women a great deal of freedom - much to the horror of the Chinese who were good Confucians. As a result, the folklore from southern China has strong females; and I found that the folktales mirrored my own experience.

The Anansi stories were in my life because they're not just 'Br'er Rabbit and the Tar-Baby in the Briar Patch,' they're stories from Jamaica and Africa that my mum used to tell us when we were kids. So I learned about Anansi being not just a spider, but also a weird god-like figure since I was little.

The books under the dust, they were stories. Folktales, fairy tales, myths, and legends. They spanned the whole world. They went back centuries, and longer.

But this is a story, and in a story there is always someone beautiful enough." - 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects

If you're a part of this urban intelligentsia, you're not around animals all the time the way people were in the past. So animals become a part of the folklore.

Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.

Aye. Fionn and the Feinn, ye ken." "Gaelic folktales

Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination, a sort of professional malady, but the confirmation of something I already suspected—folktales are real.

My work had two objectives: the presentation of every type of folktale, the existence of which is documented in Italian dialects; and the representation of all regions of Italy.