“Masters, I have to tell a tale of woe,
A tale of folly and of wasted life”

“Do you believe in fairy tales?"
"What… what kind of fairy tales?"
"The kind you aren't supposed to waste your life on.”

“I shudder as I tell the tale.”
Horresco referens.

“With living colours give my verse to glow:
The sad memorial of a tale of woe!”

“I quail,
E'en now, at telling of the tale.”

“It is the tale, not he who tells it.”

“How easy it is to tell tales!”

“I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables.”

“I am not old, — I cannot be old,
Though threescore years and ten
Have wasted away, like a tale that is told,
The lives of other men:

I am not old ; though friends and foes
Alike have gone to their graves,
And left me alone to my joys or my woes,
As a rock in the midst of the waves.”

“I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser…”