Quotes about tale
page 2

“If you wish for something hard enough, the fairy tales teach us, you can get it in the end. But it's hardly ever the way you thought it would be, and the endings aren't always happy ones.”

Jennifer Weiner book Good in Bed

Source: Good in Bed

Happiness, Way

“That's the thing about being the product of happily marries parents, You grow up thinking the fairy tale is real, and more than that, you think you're entitled to live it. So far, though, it wasn't working out as planned.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Choice

Source: The Choice

Thinking, Parent

“In fairy tales, the princesses kiss the frogs, and the frogs become princes. In real life, the pricesses kiss princes, and the princes turn into frogs.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)
Variant: There's nothing deeper than love. In fairy tales, the princesses kiss the frogs, and the frogs become princes. In real life, the princesses kiss princes, and the princes turn into frogs.
Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Life, Kiss, Princess

“Sharing tales of those we've lost is how we keep from really losing them.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

“And in what fairy tale would John ever be any sane person's idea of Prince Charming anyway? He was the opposite of charming. More like Prince Terrifying.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Abandon

Idea, Personality

“The Princess Bride
S. Morgenstern's
Classic Tale of True Love
and High Adventure

You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone had a chance to read it.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

Love, Books, Guy, Chance

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

Stephen King (1947) American author

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

Kara Walker (1969) African American artist

History

“This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as non-traditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank.”

Christopher Moore book Fool

Source: Fool

“I tell you this as a cautionary tale: beware of getting what you want. It's bound to disappoint you.”

Jodi Picoult book Sing You Home

Source: Sing You Home

Disappointment

“She laced her fingers through his. "Good night," she whispered. With their hands clasped like children in a fairy tale, she fell asleep beside him in the dark.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Children, Night

“The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.”

Orson Scott Card Enchantment

Source: Enchantment

Beauty, Fools, Sleep

“You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

Source: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Reality

“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.”

James Baldwin book Sonny's Blues

Source: Sonny's Blues

Light, Suffering

“You and me Haymitch. Very cozy. Picnics, birthdays, long winter nights sitting around the fire retelling old Hunger Games tale.
-Peeta Mellark”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Hunger, Game, Birthday, Winter

“at the center of every fairy tale lay a truth that gave the story its power.”

Susan Wiggs (1958) American writer

Source: The You I Never Knew

Truth

“I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.
We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”
-In the yellow time of pollen”

Luke Davies (1962) Australian writer

Mountain, Water, Time

“Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reality, Sense, Freedom

“A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto,… not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.”

Salman Rushdie Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Source: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Idea

“A lie took two parties - the weaver of the tale and the sucker who so badly wanted to believe it.”

Jodi Picoult Salem Falls

Source: Salem Falls

Lie

“This is a fairy tale with teeth and claws.”

Ilsa J. Bick (1957) American writer

Source: Drowning Instinct

“You look hot. The straight men will want you, the gay men will want beauty tips, and the women will want to scratch your eyes out. If that isn't the stuff of fairy tales, I don't know what is.”

Zoey Dean (1950) American writer

Source: How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls

Women, Men, Beauty

“Beyond the picket fences and the oil wells, the happy endings, and the fairy tales, is the reality of shattered lives and broken dreams. We carry on.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Happiness, Dreams, Reality

“O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.”

Leo Rosten (1908–1997) American writer

Life

“Unhappy man! Do you share my maddness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me; let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

“Remember all fairy tales end at some point.”

Melissa de la Cruz (1971) American writer

Source: Lost in Time

“Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Heart

“And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Love, Sadness

“That means life itself is a fairy tale. Like the characters, we all live and love and search for a happily-ever-after.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Night

Love, Life, Search

“If both Church and fairy-tale belong to humanity, they may occasionally cross circles, without injury to either.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

Source: Adela Cathcart

“Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.”

David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian

Letters
Source: Letters of David Hume 2 vols

Sense

“Fairy tales have rules. You are a princess or you aren’t. You are pure at heart or you aren’t. If you are pure at heart, or lucky, you might catch a break.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Heart, Princess

“Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.”

Paulo Coelho book Brida

Source: Brida

People, World, Universe, Joy

“The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them… Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Book I, Ch. 20
Attributed

Life, Dependency

“What they don't know is that I went over the edge years ago, and lived to tell the tale.”

Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Variant: I have been to the edge and lived to tell the tale..
Source: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

“Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs wouldn´t exist at all.”

Marya Hornbacher book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

World

“Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Truth

“Tale-bearers are as bad as the tale-makers.”

Richard Brinsley Sheridan The School for Scandal

Act I, sc. i.
Source: The School for Scandal (1777)

“To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.
To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed.
This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

Perfection

“I don’t think man was meant to attain happiness so easily. Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Happiness, Thinking, Fight

“Once I learned, I went online and ordered every romance novel I could find. They're fairy tales for grown-ups.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Night

Learning

“Fairy tales only happen in movies."
-George Melies

from The Invention of Hugo Cabret”

Brian Selznick book The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Source: The Invention of Hugo Cabret

“None of [the books are] worth reading. There are no fairy tales, no faerie tails, no sword-swinging princesses or lightning-throwing gods.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

God, Books, Reading, Princess

“I find myself fascinated by a man who admits to enjoying fairy tales and uses the word "impinge"- barely misses a beat while indulging in a brief girl-on-girl fantasy. You're a man of layers, Ford."
Me and Shrek, we're onions.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Tribute

Girl

“She knows that whispers can be useful. Sometimes they contain real information. But usually they're fairy tales and lies. This is the worst kind of whisper, the kind that draws you in, gives you hope.”

Julianna Baggott book Pure

Source: Pure

Hope, Drawing

“The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.”

Marina Warner (1946) writer and mythographer

Source: From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

Hope, Appearance

“The greatest tales, well told, awaken the fears and longings of the listeners. Each man hears a different story. Each is touched by it according to his inner self. The words go to the ear, but the true message travels straight to the spirit.”

Juliet Marillier book Son of the Shadows

Source: Son of the Shadows

Fear, Travel

“This was not a fearie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful.”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Variant: This was not a faerie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful.
Source: Violet & Claire

Life, Beauty, Hurt

“It's not the tales of Stephen King that I've read,
I need protection from the things in my head…”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Reading

“I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours”

Jack Kerouac book Tristessa

Source: Tristessa

Life, People, Sadness, Memory

“Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.”

Cameron Dokey (1956) American writer

Source: Before Midnight: A Retelling of Cinderella

“Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Princess

“You want the fairy tale."
"I want a chance at it.”

Rachel Gibson (1961) American writer

Source: I'm In No Mood For Love

Chance

“Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 57.
Context: Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales. … Knowing nothing and fearing everything, they rant and rave and riot like so many maniacs. The subject does not matter. Any idea which gives them an excuse of getting excited will serve. They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally avowable emotion. It may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman or even a doctor whose views displease the Medial Trust.

People, Nature, Fight

“Butterflies and zebras
And moonbeams and fairy tales
That's all she ever thinks about
Riding with the wind.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

Thinking

“This isn't a fairy tale. It's New York City.”

Alex Flinn book Beastly

Source: Beastly

“The tales we tell ourselves about ourselves makes us who we are.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Second Helpings

“With their hands clasped like children in a fairy tale, she fell asleep beside him in the dark.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Children

“Many forgotten things live still in children's tales.”

Alison Croggon book The Riddle

Source: The Riddle

Children

“There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Source: Holy the Firm (1977)

Love, Learning, Time, Heart

“They were still all beautiful and there was still enchantment and wonder, but she had crossed a line and now the fairy tale was green with corruption and evil.”

Stephen King book Carrie

Source: Carrie

Beauty, Evil

“Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.”

Frank McCourt book Angela's Ashes

Angela's Ashes
Angela's Ashes (1996)

Singing, Dance

“So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!”

Jean Paul Sartre No Exit

Garcin, Act 1, sc. 5
Variant: So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.
Source: No Exit (1944)

People, Hell

“Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.”

Jennifer Weiner (1970) American writer

Heart

“A tale without love is like beef without mustard: insipid.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Un conte sans amour est comme du boudin sans moutarde; c’est chose insipide. <br class="br"> La Révolte des Anges http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_R%C3%A9volte_des_anges_-_8 [The Revolt of the Angels], (1914), ch. VIII

Love

“The bigger question to ask about 300 is why, for a supposedly rousing tale of heroism, it's so curiously unaffecting.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/03/09/300/index.html of 300 (2007)

Question

“Seeing the water birds on the lake increase in number day by day, I thought to myself how nice it would be if it snowed before we got back to the Palace—the garden would look so beautiful; and then, two days later, while I was away on a short visit, lo and behold, it did snow. As I watched the rather drab scene at home, I felt both depressed and confused. For some years now I had existed from day to day in listless fashion, taking note of the flowers, the birds in song, the way the skies change from season to season, the moon, the frost and snow, doing little more than registering the passage of time. How would it all turn out? The thought of my continuing loneliness was unbearable, and yet I had managed to exchange sympathetic letters with those of like mind—some contacted via fairly tenuous connections—who would discuss my trifling tales and other matters with me; but I was merely amusing myself with fictions, finding solace for my idleness in foolish words. Aware of my own insignificance, I had at least managed for the time being to avoid anything that might have been considered shameful or unbecoming; yet here I was, tasting the bitterness of life to the very full.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Diary of Lady Murasaki

trans. Richard Bowring (Penguin Books, 1996)
The Diary of Lady Murasaki

Life, Beauty, Way, Home

“This suffering will yield us yet
A pleasant tale to tell.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book I, p. 12

Suffering

“It is an ancient custom, as ancient as the Roman Empire, to idolize those whom we honor, to make them larger than life, to give their marvelous accomplishments a magical and mystical origin. By exalting the accomplishments of Martin Luther King Jr. into a legendary tale that is annually told, we fail to recognize his humanity -- his personal and public struggles -- that are similar to yours and mine. By idolizing those whom we honor, we fail to realize that we could go and do likewise.”

Charles V. Willie (1927) American sociologist

The Ethical Foundations of Dr. King's Political Action http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/01.17/99-mlkspeech.html Speech on Martin Luther King day (2002)

Life, Personality

“There are ghosts and there is love,
And both are present here,
To those who listen, this tale will tell
The truth of love and if it's near.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Miss Harkins, Chapter 13, p. 139
2000s, A Bend in the Road (2001)

Love, Truth

“The Tale of Genji in particular is the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature. Even down to our day there has not been a piece of fiction to compare with it. That such a modern work should have been written in the eleventh century is a miracle, and as a miracle the work is widely known abroad.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)

Literature

“When I first joined my local library, I read endlessly. I immediately headed for the fantasy section, fairy tales, you name it. As a teen-ager, I read every novel by Kenneth Roberts, who wrote historical novels about the Revolutionary War period. My mother used to read to me. Heidi was one of my childhood favorites.”

Richard Matheson (1926–2013) American fiction writer

The New York Times interview (1994)

War, Reading, Childhood

“Who says that English folk have no fairy-tales of their own?”

Joseph Jacobs book English Fairy Tales

English Fairy Tales (1890), Preface to English Fairy Tales

“All legends must be based on lies, Gordon realized. We exaggerate, and even come to believe the tales, after a while.”

David Brin book The Postman

Source: The Postman (1985), Section 3, “Cincinnatus”, Chapter 18 (p. 298)

“The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of _____; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected.”

Anthony Trollope book The Warden

Source: The Warden (1855), Ch. 1, first lines

Question, Personality

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

Karen Blixen book Anecdotes of Destiny

Anecdotes of Destiny (1953)

World

“Cosmologists have plenty of ego — how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the universe into existence? But without data, their explanations were just tall tales. In this modern era of cosmology, each new observation, each morsel of data wields a two-edged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn't enough data to say whether they were wrong or not. No science achieves maturity without it.Let there be cosmology.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Let There Be Light, Natural History Magazine, October 2003, 2010-12-07 http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2003/10/01/let-there-be-light, <br class="br">2000s

People, Universe, Science, Personality

“Dershowitz: The Israeli military then did an analysis, and they discovered, of course, that when they dropped that bomb and killed those people, they had no idea that those people were in the building, and the people who made the decision to drop the bomb were criticized and disciplined for it. The point I make is, when they knew, for sure, that family members were there, they withheld doing it. That doesn't deny the fact that on occasion they will accidentally make a decision that's wrong. The difference is deliberateness, willfulness…
Norman Finkelstein: …That was a nice fairy tale, dropping a 1 ton bomb on a densely populated civilian neighborhood in Gaza, and they had no idea that civilians would be there. And then he goes on to fantasy #2, that those who did it were disciplined. Really, Mr. Dershowitz? I'd love the evidence for that. I mean, if I could get $10,000 for every one of your fraudulent statements…”

Alan M. Dershowitz (1938) American lawyer, author

Never Before Aired: Watch PART II of the debate between Finkelstein and Dershowitz http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=109 (archive located here http://web.archive.org/web/20120814094352/http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/never-before-aired-watch-part-ii-of-the-debate-between-finkelstein-and-dershowitz/ is a continuation of part 1 http://web.archive.org/web/20120910213955/http://www.democracynow.org/2003/9/24/scholar_norman_finkelstein_calls_professor_alan) published 2003-9-24

Love, People, Family, Idea

“A really critical mind will not be content to remark the patent absurdity of the tales about supernatural beings and events in the "New Testament," but will go on to examine the purposes those tales were devised to serve. It requires no great critical acumen to perceive the appalling malice shown in Bolshevik promises that "the last shall be first"; the proletarian rancor of almost continual harping on the threat that rich men will be fried forever hereafter if they do not give all that they have to the poor and become paupers themselves; the frantic hatred of reason evinced by hostility to "the Greeks" who "seek after wisdom" and try to understand nature and the real world instead of drugging themselves with narcotic fantasies; the frightful malevolence of a god "who has made foolish the wisdom of this world" to profit a squalid and mindless rabble; and the hatred of all culture and civilization implicit in the election of illiterate boors as apostles and the insistence in the Drivel on the Mount on the need for bird-brains that "take no thought for the morrow" and, indeed, emulate the intellectual processes of vegetables.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"The Bear in the Bush", Liberty Bell (September 1990)
1990s

Wisdom, Men, God, Hostility

“The first work I published was a poem. That was one of my most exciting moments. Afterwards, I wrote many different types of articles, including prose, novels, and even science fiction. However, I found I wasn't very qualified, because I only had a four-year primary school education. So I turned to writing fairy tales.”

Zheng Yuanjie (1955) Chiese writer

Zheng Yuanjie (2008) in: "China's Hans Christian Andersen" on CRIENGLISH.com, June 19, 2008 ( online http://english.cri.cn/4406/2008/06/19/1141@370720.htm).

Education, School, Science

“I propose to tell you a very brief tale about a love which…ran a smooth course to its happy conclusion.”

Giovanni Boccaccio book The Decameron

Uno amore...a lieto fin pervenuto, in una novelletta assai piccola intendo di raccontarvi.
Fifth Day, Fourth Story
The Decameron (c. 1350)

Love, Happiness

“These plays and stories have for their continual theme the passing away of gods and men and cities before the mysterious power which is sometimes called by some great god's name but more often 'Time.' His travellers, who travel by so many rivers and deserts and listen to sounding names none heard before, come back with no tale that does not tell of vague rebellion against that power, and all the beautiful things they have seen get something of their charm from the pathos of fragility. This poet who has imagined colours, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allen Poe or of De Quincey, and remembered as much fabulous beauty as Sir John Mandeville, has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of beauty; and when we come to examine those astonishments that seemed so alien we find that he has but transfigured with beauty the common sights of the world.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

About

Men, God, World, Beauty

“I don't understand how many painters can be so short-sighted to value art from earlier periods as completely worthless. Every art is an expression of an era and only for that reason already it is interesting. A Rembrandt has gone other ways, but he has certainly also pursued the highest goals. That one can assert: it is not necessary for a painter to have an impression when he is painting an Image, is nonsense. Certainly an artist, if he is really an artist, always has an inner urge to create an Image and thus sees an impression for himself that he may not always be able to explain, because deeper feelings are very difficult to grasp in words, but he has an impression - otherwise he only makes paintings as pure brain work. And intellectual art I can't bear. You can not make abstract art as something on its own. One feel various forms in their inner coherence. For example: when reading a fairy tale I can get the idea to paint a forest in completely abstract forms with motifs of trees. Every abstract form has an inner meaning for me.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in Dutch / citaat van Jacoba van Heemskerck, in het Nederlands vertaald: Ik begrijp niet hoe veel schilders zo kortzichtig kunnen zijn kunst uit vroegere perioden als volkomen waardeloos aan te merken. Elke kunst is een uiting van een tijdperk en alleen daarom al interessant. Een Rembrandt is andere wegen gegaan maar heeft zeker ook de hoogste doelen nagestreefd. Dat men beweren kan: een schilder hoeft bij het schilderen van een Bild geen voorstelling te hebben, is onzin. Zeker heeft een kunstenaar, als hij werkelijk artiest is, altijd een innerlijke drang een Bild te scheppen en ziet dus een Bild voor zich dat hij misschien niet altijd verklaren kan omdat diepere gevoelens heel moeilijk in woorden te vatten zijn, maar een voorstelling heeft hij - anders maakt hij schilderijen en is het puur hersenwerk. En intellectuele kunst staat mij zeer tegen. Abstracte kunst is niet op zich zelf staand te maken. Men voelt verscheidene vormen in hun innerlijke samenhang. Bijvoorbeeld: bij het lezen van een sprookje kan ik de ingeving krijgen een bos in geheel abstracte vormen met boommotieven te schilderen. Elke abstracte vorm heeft voor mij een innerlijke betekenis.
Quote of Jacoba van Heemskerck in her letter of 1 May 1920, to Gustave Bock in Giessen, Germany; as cited in Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest, 1876 – 1923: schilderes uit roeping, A. H. Huussen jr. (ed. Marleen Blokhuis), (ISBN: 90-400-9064-5) Waanders, Zwolle, 2005, p. 168
1920's

Art, Way, Feeling, Idea

“Friendly fascism,” says Sadeq. “It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 5 (“Router”), p. 201

Soul, Parent

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

William Falconer (1732–1769) British writer

Introduction, lines 35-36.
The Shipwreck (1762)

Sadness, Memory

“Come, Erato, come lovely Muse, stand by me and take up the tale. How did Medea's passion help Jason to bring back the fleece to Iolcus?”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book III. Jason and Medea, Lines 1–3

Love, Passion, Help

“Tell me the tales that to me were so dear,
Long, long ago, long, long ago.”

Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797–1839) English poet, songwriter, dramatist, and writer

Long, long ago, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Book #10: A Book of Travellers' Tales. As it hits the water its pages detach themselves from the covers, which sink… and the pages form themselves into small paper boats that float away on the tide.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

Books, Travel, Water

“In some way the material universe appears to be passing away like a tale that is told, dissolving into nothingness like a vision.”

Edmund Cooper (1926–1982) British writer

The Overman Culture (1971)

Way, Universe, Appearance

“Lest men suspect your tale untrue,
Keep probability in view.”

John Gay (1685–1732) English poet and playwright

Fable, The Painter who pleased Nobody and Everybody
Fables (1727)

Men

“Life isn’t a fairy tale; the knight who kills the dragon doesn’t necessarily get the princess. So what? Who’d want to live in a cosmos less rich and various than the real one?”

Poul Anderson book The Star Fox

Section 3 “Admiralty”, Chapter X (p. 207)
The Star Fox (1965)

Life, Princess

“"I wended my way to the graveyard this evening," wrote Anne to Gilbert after she got home. "I think 'wend your way' is a lovely phrase and I work it in whenever I can. It sounds funny to say I enjoyed my stroll in the graveyard but I really did. Miss Courtaloe's stories were so funny. Comedy and tragedy are so mixed up in life, Gilbert. The only thing that haunts me is that tale of the two who lived together fifty years and hated each other all that time. I can't believe they really did. Somebody has said that 'hate is only love that has missed its way.' I feel sure that under the hatred they really loved each other… just as I really loved you all those years I thought I hated you… and I think death would show it to them."”

Lucy Maud Montgomery book Anne of Windy Poplars

Part 1, Ch. 6
Anne of Windy Poplars (1936)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“That’s what it’s going to be then, brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale. You have been everywhere with your little droog Alex, suffering with him, and you have viddied some of the most grahzny bratchnies old Bog ever made, all on to your old droog Alex. And all it was was that I was young. But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Suffering

“The World is divided into armed camps ready to commit genocide just because we can't agree on whose fairy tales to believe. In the end, Religion will kill us all.”

Ed Krebs (1951) American photographer and musician

Had Enough Religious Bullshit http://www.edkrebs.com/herb/, Ed Krebs' site.

World, Religion

“Fairy tales--simple stories for simple minds, a breath of air to cool brows overheated by the complexities of real life.”

Matthew Stover book Heroes Die

Heroes Die (1998)

Life

“How easy it is to tell tales!”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

Jacques le Fataliste (1796)

“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.”

Martin Farquhar Tupper (1810–1889) English writer and poet

The Song of Seventy.
A Thousand Lines (1846)

Men, Joy

“If I could read your mind love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel just like the kind a drug store would sell
When you reach the part where the heart aches come the hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won't read that book again because the endings just too hard to take..”

Gordon Lightfoot (1938) Canadian singer-songwriter

If You Could Read My Mind, Track 8, Reprise
Sit Down Young Stranger (1970)

Love, Books, Reading, Heart

“The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fair-tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in a writing by Chagall, in Chagall's early work in the Soviet Union, Alexander Kamensky; as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 41
1920's

Star

“The term "spirit projection " sprang to mind. Are you familiar with it? Japanese folk tales are full of this sort of thing, where the soul temporarily leaves the body and goes off a great distance to take care of some vital task and then returns to reunite with the body. The sort of vengeful spirits that populate The Tale of Genji may be something similar. The notion of the soul not just leaving the body at death but-assuming the will is strong enough -also being able to separate from the body of the living is probably an idea that took root in Japan in ancient times. Of course there's no scientific proof of this, and I hesitate to even raise the idea.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter Eight,

Death, Soul, Idea, Strong

Quotes about tale page 2

Quotes about tale
page 2