Quotes about tale
page 4

“Our life is our own to-day, to-morrow you will be dust, a shade, and a tale that is told. Live mindful of death; the hour flies.”
Nostrum est quod vivis, cinis et manes et fabula fies. vive memor leti, fugit hora.

Persius (34–62) ancient latin poet

Nostrum est
quod vivis, cinis et manes et fabula fies.
vive memor leti, fugit hora.
Satire V, line 151.
The Satires

Life, Death

“Ernest Bramah's China, then, is the fantastic bogus China of convention, not the real historical thing at all. He wrote of it in a prose so perfectly conceived that it becomes a miracle of style. As Hilaire Belloc once observed, the sly humor and philosophy of Bramah's stories is a trick he achieves by pretending to adapt the flavor of Chinese literary conventions into the English. But the thing I love most about the tales is their irony and the brilliance of their wit.”

Ernest Bramah (1868–1942) English author

Lin Carter Discoveries in Fantasy (London, 1974) pp. 5-6.
Criticism

Love

“For angling-rod he took a sturdy oake;
For line, a cable that in storm ne'er broke;
His hooke was such as heads the end of pole
To pluck down house ere fire consumes it whole;
The hook was baited with a dragon's tale,—
And then on rock he stood to bob for whale.”

William Davenant (1606–1668) English poet and playwright

Britannia Triumphans (1637; licensed Jan. 8, 1638; printed 1638), p. 15.
Compare:
"For angling rod he took a sturdy oak; / For line, a cable that in storm ne'er broke;... His hook was baited with a dragon's tail,— / And then on rock he stood to bob for whale."
From The Mock Romance, a rhapsody attached to The Loves of Hero and Leander, published in London in 1653 and 1677, republished in Chambers's Book of Days, vol. i. p. 173; Samuel Daniel, Rural Sports, Supplement, p. 57.
"His angle-rod made of a sturdy oak;
His line, a cable which in storms ne'er broke;
His hook he baited with a dragon’s tail,—
And sat upon a rock, and bobb'd for whale"
William King (1663–1712), Upon a Giant’s Angling (in Chalmers's British Poets, ascribed to King).

Housing

“My heart beats more for a rougher, more ordinary, more vulgar art that does not live in a poetic, fairy-tale dream but admits the fearful, the common, the magnificent, the ordinary, the banal grotesque in life. An art that can always be directly present to us when life is at its most real.. [ on the same day he noted:].. Martin thinks there will be a war. Russia England France against Germany. We agreed that it would be no bad thing for our rather demoralized present-day civilization if everyone's instincts and drives were to be harnessed to one cause..”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Beckmann's Diary, 9 January, 1909, in Leben in Berlin: Tagebuch, 1908-1909, ed. Hans Kinkel; R. Piper & Co., Munich and Zurich, 1983, pp. 22-23; as quoted in 'Portfolios', Alexander Dückers; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 99
1900s - 1920s

Life, War, Fear, Dreams

“A teacher?”
“Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which here is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves.”
“Interesting.”
“Well. Yes. There is god of sorts, Croaker. Do you know? Not a mover and shaker, though. Simply a negator. An ender of tales. He has a hunger that cannot be sated. The universe itself will slide down his maw.”
“Death?”
“I do not want to die, Croaker. All that I am shrieks against the unrighteousness of death. All that I am, was, and probably will be, is shaped by my passion to evade the end of me.” She laughed quietly, but there was a thread of hysteria there. She gestured, indicating the shadowed killing ground below. “I would have built a world in which I was safe. And the cornerstone of my citadel would have been death.”
The end of the dream was drawing close. I could not imagine a world without me in it, either. And the inner me was outraged. Is outraged. I have no trouble imagining someone becoming obsessed with escaping death.
“I understand.”

Glen Cook book The White Rose

“Maybe. We’re all equals at the dark gate, no? The sands run for us all. Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair!”
Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 39, “A Guest at Charm” (p. 625)

Life, Death, Hunger, God

“Soon as the evening shades prevail,
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth;
While all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 465, Ode (23 August 1712).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

Truth, Star, Birth

“She speaketh as she would créepe into your bosome.
And when the meale mouth hath woon the bottome
of your stomake, than will the pickthanke it tell
To your most enmies, you to bye and fell.
To tell tales out of schoole, that is hir great lust.
Looke what she knowth, blab it wist, out it must.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

She speaks as she would creep into your bosom.
And when the mealy mouth has won the bottom
of your stomach, then will the pickthank it tell
To your most enemies, you to buy and sell.
To tell tales out of school, that is her great lust.
Look what she knows, blab it wist, out it must.
Part I, chapter 10.
Proverbs (1546)

School

“So all they see of me is a façade. There are times when I am forced to sit with them and on such occasions I simply ignore their petty criticisms, not because I am particularly shy but because I consider it pointless. As a result, they now look upon me as a dullard.
"Well, we never expected this!" they all say. "No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous and scornful; but when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether!"
How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as such a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am. Her Majesty has also remarked more than once that she had thought I was not the kind of person with whom she could ever relax, but that I have now become closer to her than any of the others. I am so perverse and standoffish. If only I can avoid putting off those for whom I have a genuine regard.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Diary of Lady Murasaki

trans. Richard Bowring
The Diary of Lady Murasaki

Time, Personality

“Let those whose Hearts and Hands are strong
Tell eager Tales of mighty Deeds;
Enough if my sequestered song
To hush'd and twilight Gardens leads!

Clear Waters, drawn from secret Wells
Perchance may fevered Lips assuage;
The Tales an elder Pilgrim tells
To such as go on Pilgrimage.

Such the soft Path my Words would trace,
Thus with the moving Waters move;
So leave, across the Ocean's Face,
A glimmering Stair to Hope and Love.”

A. C. Benson (1862–1925) English essayist, poet, author and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge

Prologue.
The Isles of Sunset (1904)

Love, Secret, Hope, Strong

“As the anima does with men, the animus also creates states of possession in women. In myths and fairy tales this condition is often represented by the devil or an "old man of the mountain," that is, a troll or ogre, holding the heroine prisoner and forcing her to kill all men who approach her or to deliver them into the hands of the demon; or else the father shuts up the heroine in a tower or a grave or sets her on a glass mountain, so that no one can get near her. In such cases, the heroine can often do nothing but wait patiently for a savior to deliver her from her plight. Through her suffering, the animus (for both the demon and the savior are two aspects of the same inner power) can be gradually transformed into a positive inner force.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Animus, a Woman's Inner Man

Women, Men, Mountain, Suffering

“"What is good for a bootless bene?"
With these dark words begins my tale;
And their meaning is, Whence can comfort spring
When prayer is of no avail?”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Force of Prayer.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Spring

“There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window on something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness.”

John Varley (1947) American science fiction author

"In the Bowl", The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (December 1975), reprinted in The Persistence of Vision (1978)

World, Question, Childhood

“I am the teller of the tale, not the creator of the story.”

Michael Powell (1905–1990) English film director

Attributed

“Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, makes the monk much better skilled in riding and hunting, than in divinity. The same poit, afterwards, in the Ploughman's Tale, takes occasion to accuse the monks of pride, because they rode on coursers like knights, having their hawks and hounds with them. In the same tale he severely reproaches the priests for their dissolute manners, saying, that many of them thought more upon hunting with their dogs, and blowing the horn, than of the service they owed to God.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 10
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Hunting

God, Dogs

“…there must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"Brave Words for a Startling Occasion" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 153.

Truth, History

“For the old great, mighty Germany, which was the epitome of the yearning of our ancestors and our pride when one could still hold one's head high at being a German, is going under. One cannot say: it is long gone because it is not long at all but already it sounds to our ears like a fairy tale from a distant time.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Letter to his sons (21 June 1919), quoted in Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar's Greatest Statesman (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 135-136
1910s

Distant, Time

“Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Introduction
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Love, Age, Childhood

“The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

Introduction
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

War, Children, Age, Peace

“My own story is like a fairy tale nobody would believe because it's exactly what you expect but it never happened.”

François-Eudes Chanfrault (1974–2016) Composer and musician

Twitchfilm.com interview (September 10, 2008)

“But when the dreaded moment's there
He'll face us all, a soldier yet,
Watch his bared wounds with unmoved air,
(Though tell-tale lashes still are wet),
And smoke his Woodbine cigarette.”

Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet

Unsourced, In A Soldiers' Hospital 1: Pluck

“As it turns out, Mailer comes close to solving the mystery [of Lee Harvey Oswald], but he never establishes the tragedy. Dreiser's tale was tragic and American because it happened every day. Oswald made only one notch in the calendar. It was meaningless; he just renamed an airport, violently.
…Oswald's life was not a cry of pain so much as a squawk for attention. He achieved geopolitical significance by the shortest possible route. He was not an example of post-modern absurdity but one of its messiahs: an inspiration to the glazed loner. He killed Kennedy not to impress Jodie Foster. He killed Kennedy to impress Clio - the muse of history.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Review of Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery by Norman Mailer, p. 277
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Life, Pain, History, Cry

“Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.”

Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) Royal Navy officer and explorer

Journal, 29 March 1912 http://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/diaries/scottslastexpedition/; final words, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition (1913) vol.1, ch.20

Courage, Heart, Dependency, Dead

“Out of this folk mind, turned into stories and crowded with thousands of years of life, grew, literally, the Chinese novel. For these novels changed as they grew. If, as I have said, there are no single names attached beyond question to the great novels of China, it is because no one hand wrote them. From beginning as a mere tale, a story grew through succeeding versions, into a structure built by many hands.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

Life, Question, Change

“An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 60

“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

Introduction.
The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Christmas, Housing

“To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Notes on the Third Tale (p. 69)
City (1952)

Way, Knowledge

“The world is a fairy tale; we are its guardians.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“A Fairy Tale and the End,” p. 40
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: "Forgotten Place”

World

“The Lost Music was his way of talking about the way he believed that old wives' tales and dance tunes and folktales were just the tangled echoes of something that's not quite of this world … something we all knew once, but have forgotten since.”

Charles de Lint (1951) author

Part One: The Hidden People, "The Quarrlsome Piper" p. 19
The Little Country (1991)

World, Music, Way, Dance

“She was devastatingly cruel about our home town and told an elaborate, embossed tale about how she made good her escape. She referred to it as 'The Planet Brisbane' and ridiculed its unpleasant combination of smug self-satisfaction and provincial defensiveness.”

Susan Ruth Johnson (1959)

Page 46.
Hungry Ghosts (1996)

Home

“Pieces of a dream unfolding what happened to the fairy tale
Words of love are never spoken
Things in life aren't always fair
I'll protect you and I'll guide you and I'll give you all the love that is mine
Just know in time
You'll be fine.”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

You'll Be Fine
Heavy Rotation (2008)

Love, Life, Dreams, Time

“It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Talk titled "The World After September 11th", AFSC Conference at Tufts University, Massachusetts, December 8, 2001 https://web.archive.org/web/20011230091612/http://www.zmag.org/chomskyafter911.htm. Quotes 2000s, 2001

Children, World, Evil

“Yet again - visible and invisible. The panic of loneliness - not physical, far more moral - arises from the fact that every lonely person is wearing a tarnkappe, a magic hood, (in German fairy tales, a magic cap which makes the wearer invisible) against his will: which is tantamount to saying: "If people don't bother about me, it's because nobody is seeing me - seeing me. I'm just a piece of furniture in their eyes." … Newcomers in a strange world suffer this fate especially, what's more in a doubly unpleasant way: first because no one takes any notice of them since they don't belong, i. e. they're nobodies, yet at the same time they're conspicuous, in the way, a nuisance, desperately conscious of being just awkward lumps of furniture.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59

Fate, People, World, Way

“For many years he had suffered from consumption, aggravated perhaps by his work of glass polishing. On Sunday, February 21, 1677, the end came unexpectedly, and almost suddenly. …
Credit must be given to Colerus [John Kohler]… for his downright contradiction of the tales concerning Spinoza's death-bed which were circulated, it would seem, by persons who thought it would tend to edification to represent Spinoza as the blustering infidel of popular orthodox polemics, who is invariably assailed by doubt and disquietude in his last moments, and as invariably strives to disguise them with feeble bravado. Colerus very honestly says that the people of the house… knew nothing of any such matters, and did not believe a word of them.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Selected works, Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1880)

Death, People, Suffering, Housing

“If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

Source: The History of Pendennis (1848-1850), Ch. 42.

Secret, Books, History

“But, when tales of the cosmos are told, this period of ours may always be recalled as that in which men first came to realise what a violent universe we inhabit.”

Nigel Calder (1931–2014) British science writer

Closing words, p. 154
Violent Universe (1969)

Men, Universe

“2057. Drive away and never endure Tale-bearers : Whoever entertains thee with the Faults of others, designs to serve thee in the same Kind.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

“A final word. Drowning by Numbers is a story of three women who murder their husbands -- one in a bath, one in the sea and one in a swimming pool. It is a black and ironic fairy-tale for adults, half invented by children who are innocently obsessed with sex and death -- especially death. It is a poetic, amoral tale told morally to support the belief that the good are seldom rewarded, the bad go largely unpunished and the innocent are always abused.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Fear of Drowning By Numbers

Death, Women, Children, Sex

“It is only a plain tale of plain people told in the plain dialect of a plain old woman.”

Eliza Calvert Hall (1856–1935) American author, women's rights advocate and suffragist

Hall, Eliza Calvert (1910). "Introduction". Sally Ann's Experience. Illustrated by G. Patrick Nelson, Theodore Brown Hapgood. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. pp. v - xii. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ugAZAAAAYAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA50&dq=aunt+jane+of+kentucky&ots=Oaz4lMOoks&sig=_ET0k7b6BWOlRwCqW5Qja3baNvg#v=onepage&q=Introduction&f=false. Lida Obenchain's description of her then famous story Sally Ann's Experience.

People

“For when we are interested in the beauty of a thing, the oftener we can see it the better; but when we are interested only by the story of a thing, we get tired of hearing the same tale told over and over again, and stopping always at the same point — we want a new story presently, a newer and better one — and the picture of the day, and novel of the day, become as ephemeral as the coiffure or the bonnet of the day. Now this spirit is wholly adverse to the existence of any lovely art. If you mean to throw it aside to-morrow, you can never have it to-day.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

On the Condition of Modern Art, lecture (1867).

Love, Beauty, Art

“No, In fairy tales
When to the ill-starred Prince the lady says
"I love you!" all his ugliness fades fast —
But I remain the same, up to the last!”

Edmond Rostand (1868–1918) French writer

Cyrano, Act 5, Sc. 6
Cyrano de Bergerac (1897)

Love, Star

“By lamplight turn these scented leaves and read
a tale of love recorded in old books.”

Nguyễn Du The Tale of Kieu

Source: The Tale of Kiều (1813), Lines 7–8

Love, Books, Reading

“We believe this to be the work of thieves, and I'll tell you why. The whole pattern is very reminiscent of past robberies where we have found thieves to be involved. The tell-tale loss of property — that's one of the signs we look for.”

Peter Cook Beyond the Fringe

"The Great Train Robbery" (1964)
Beyond the Fringe (1960 - 1966)

Loss, Past

“Don't judge a man by the tales of others.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

Aphorisms

“Who so shall telle a tale after a man,
He moste reherse, as neighe as ever he can,
Everich word, if it be in his charge,
All speke he never so rudely and so large;
Or elles he moste tellen his tale untrewe,
Or feinen thinges, or finden wordes newe.”

Geoffrey Chaucer book The Canterbury Tales

General Prologue, l. 733
The Canterbury Tales

“Race of the rainbow wing, the deep blue eye
Whose palace was the bosom of a flower;
Who rode upon the breathing of the rose;
Drank from the harebell; made the moon the queen
Of their gay revels; and whose trumpets were
The pink-veined honeysuckle; and who rode
Upon the summer butterfly : who slept
Lulled in the sweetness of the violet's leaves,—
Where are ye now? And ye of eastern tale,
With your bright palaces, your emerald halls;
Gardens whose fountains were of liquid gold;
Trees with their ruby fruit and silver leaves,—
Where are ye now?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(12th June 1824) Stanzas
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Flowers, Tree, Summer

“He lends credibility to the leftist tale about race in America, and gets positively angry if anyone voices complaints about racial social engineering, or even suggests, as Alan Keyes did, that poor blacks need better values.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: "Jack Kemp, American Socialist" by Jeffrey Tucker, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, September 1996, UNZ.org, 2016-05-22 http://www.unz.org/Pub/RothbardRockwellReport-1996sep-00001,

“Why, then, have we been bamboozled into accepting the usual tale without questioning? I suspect two primary reasons: we love a sensible and satisfying story, and we are disinclined to challenge apparent authority (like textbooks!). But do remember that most satisfying tales are false.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 318
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Love, Question, Falseness

“To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 11, “Of Family Gatherings, Grammatology, More Models, and More Mysteries” (p. 313)

“Contrary to what many may think, immortality is not a fairy tale invented to compensate for an unhappy life.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Bone House (2011), p. 216

Life, Thinking

“I took the leap, yes, but I didn't like the ledge where I landed — I fought the bear, I kissed the princess, but now I don't want to be king. Well, where in the fairy tales did it ever say Cinderella had to like being queen?”

Orson Scott Card Enchantment

Enchantment (1999)

Kiss, Princess

“When [ Abraham ] the "Pillar of the World" appeared, he became convinced that there is a spiritual Divine Being, which is not a body, nor a force residing in a body, but is the author of the spheres and the stars; and he saw the absurdity of the tales in which he had been brought up. He therefore began to attack the belief of the Sabeans, to expose the falsehood of their opinions, and to proclaim publicly in opposition to them, "the name of the Lord, the God of the Universe" (Gen. xxi. 33), which proclamation included at the same time the Existence of God, and the Creation of the Universe by God.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.29

God, World, Star, Universe

“Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy
In sceptred pall come sweeping by,
Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line,
Or the tale of Troy divine.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: Il Penseroso (1631), Line 97

“I have lived longer than you. I have thought more, and I have suffered more. And I tell you there is more truth to the fundamental nature of things in the most foolish fairy tales than there is in any of your complaints against life.”

J.B. Priestley I Have Been Here Before

I Have Been Here Before, Act III.

Life, Truth, Nature, Suffering

“This is a simple story of a battle; such a tale as may be told by a soldier who is no writer to a reader who is no soldier.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: What I Saw At Shiloh (1881), I

“No love-story has ever been told twice. I never heard any tale of lovers that did not seem to me as new as the world on its first morning.”

Eleanor Farjeon book Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard

Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1922)

Love, World, Lovers

“In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God (1973), p.130

Death, Spring, Light, Winter

“On the subject of the left’s latest cause du jour, the “white phosphorus” fairy tale, Michael Moynihan asks a question to which LGF readers probably already know the answer: How Credible is Jeff Englehart?”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

November 09, 2005 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=18177&only

Question

“I was traveling in Greece as a teenager, and for those who haven't been to Greece, it's absolutely covered in olive groves — stunted, gnarly little bonsai-type trees. And I was driving on a moped and a huge black stallion had pulled away from its stake and was just going nuts in this tiny, tiny, hobbit-like forest. It was just such a powerful image, this enormous beast let loose and going wild in a fairy-tale wood of tiny trees… The song itself is really about going through the process of making the first album. It was a very strange experience and a very steep learning curve. For the previous 10 or 15 years, I'd been completely my own boss — when you play a gig, you just play your new song, the new song is always your favorite. And here I was having to make an album of stuff that's never gonna go away. I was being asked to make these huge decisions, so really the song is just about learning to listen to your guts again. There's actually very few times in our lives now when we have to do that.”

KT Tunstall (1975) Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist

On influences in writing her song "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree", in a Barnes & Noble Interview with David Sprague (February 2006).

Travel, Decision, Tree, Learning

“That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business. It is screamingly obvious in Maria Edgeworth's tales, which must have done unspeakable damage to ordinary people.—Be good, and you'll have money. Be wicked, and you'll be utterly penniless at last, and the good ones will have to offer you a little charity.”

Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) Irish writer

D. H. Lawrence, Introduction to These Paintings (1929); cited from James Boulton (ed.) Late Essays and Articles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp. 192-3.
Criticism

Money, People, Business

““Do you expect even dreams to unravel rationally, Kahl Balduin? Must each event have a precise, empirical cause?”
“No, not if you’re narrating a dream. But if you claim, like the Pledgeson, that your visions and reality are the same thing, then, yes I expect consistency. I’m too old for pointless fairy tales.””

Michael Bishop (1945) American writer

Source: A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975), Chapter 7, “Interlude: Heartseed and Tower” (p. 142)

Dreams, Reality

“Thus it comes about that the endeavour of primitive people to make a clean sweep of all their troubles generally takes the form of a grand hunting out and expulsion of devils and ghosts. They think that if they can only shake off these their accursed tormentors, they will make a fresh start in life, happy and innocent; the tales of Eden and the old poetic golden age will come true again.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 56, The Public Expulsion of Evils.

Life, Happiness, People, Age

“He left the name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Source: Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Line 221

World

“The man who wishes to bend me with his tale of woe must shed true tears – not tears that have been got ready overnight.”
Nec nocte paratum, plorabit qui me volet incurvasse querella.

Persius (34–62) ancient latin poet

Nec nocte paratum,
plorabit qui me volet incurvasse querella.
Satire I, line 90.
The Satires

Tear

“Thanks to the growing politicization of the aristocracy of letters, the unwary are being fed on the misconception that the tales of tyranny over the Hindus under the Sultans and Mughuls are all fabrications of the … British… in pursuance of the much-maligned British policy of divide-and-rule.”

Harsh Narain (1921–1995) Indian writer

The Ayodhya temple-mosque dispute: Focus on Muslim sources (1993)

“Accept these images for what they are —
Out of the past a fragile element
Of substance into accident.
I would speak honestly and of a full heart;
I would speak surely for the tale is short,
And the soul's remorseless catalogue
Assumes its quick and piteous sum.”

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic

"San Francisco Night Windows"

Soul, Past, Heart

“Jokes spread around the world and embed themselves in our shared culture; the most resonant of them get lodged in the language in the same way as clichés or old wives' tales do.”

Jimmy Carr (1972) British comedian and humourist

Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves (September 21, 2006) Only Joking: What's So Funny About Making People Laugh?, Gotham, ISBN 1592402356, p. 3.

World, Way

“Making this crowd happy is the second easiest job you could ever have. First easiest… whoever gets to put Michael Jackson in a witness chair and create "reasonable doubt." How hard can that be? I don't even have a law degree and I think I could get Michael Jackson, y'know? I would just go, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury… there he is! That's all I have. Y'all get a good look at my boy? See if you think he's capable of anything out of the ordinary. There he is." But it's a tough thing to prosecute Michael Jackson, y'know? Because everyone's entitled to a jury of their peers! You could run the vacuum up and down the gene pool 24/7 without suckin' up this much of whatever that has become. He has no peers. He's peerless. So why am I pickin' on poor little mutated Michael Jackson? Because Michael Jackson is a cautionary tale for the rest of us, folks. Michael Jackson is what happens when you keep fixin' it until it's broke!”

Richard Jeni (1957–2007) American comedian

A Big, Steaming Pile Of Me

Happiness, Law, Boy, Thinking

“I shall now no more behold my dear father with these "bodily eyes. With him a whole threescore and ten years of the past has doubly died for me. It is as if a new leaf in the great hook of time were turned over. Strange time — endless time or of which I see neither end nor beginning. All rushes on. Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told; yet under Time does there not lie Eternity? Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognize one another. As it is written. We shall be forever with God. The possibility, nay (in some way), the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer to me. "The essence of whatever was, is, or shall be, even now is." God is great. God is good. His will be done, for it will be right. As it is, I can think peaceably of the departed love. All that was earthly, harsh, sinful, in our relation has fallen away; all that was holy in it remains. I can see my dear father's life in some measure as the sunk pillar on which mine was to rise and be built; the waters of time have now swelled up round his (as they will round mine); I can see it all transfigured, though I touch it no longer. I might almost say his spirit seems to have entered into me (so clearly do I discern and love him); I seem to myself only the continuation and second volume of my father. These days that I have spent thinking of him and of his end are the peaceablest, the only Sabbath that I have had in London. One other of the universal destinies of man has overtaken me. Thank Heaven, I know, and have known, what it is to be a son; to love a father, as spirit can love spirit. God give me to live to my father's honor and to His. And now, beloved father, farewell for the last time in this world of shadows I In the world of realities may the Great Father again bring us together in perfect holiness and perfect love! Amen!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Love, Life, God, Lie

“If we choose a weak and foolish speculation as a primary textbook illustration (falsely assuming that the tale possesses a weight of history and a sanction of evidence), then we are in for trouble - as critics properly nail the particular weakness, and then assume that the whole theory must be in danger if supporters choose such a fatuous case as a primary illustration.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 314
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

History, Support, Falseness

“Corben's technique introduced the airbrush to comics. His sophisticated knowledge of how color is printed allowed him to get fantastic results. His work has maintained a sense of humor and spectacle in tales of barbarians, time travelers and Arabian nights.|Harvey Kurtzman”

Richard Corben (1940) American illustrator

[Kurtzman, Harvey, From Aargh! to Zap!, Prentice Hall Press, New York, 1991, 88, 978-0-13-363680-2]</ref>}}

Color, Travel, Knowledge, Sense

“Yes you see boys and girls, you see we came from a dot and that dot came from nothing. Now they call that Science and put it in a Science book? I’d call that a fairy tale and put it in the garbage.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Age of the Earth

Books, Girl, Boy, Science

“I'm reading George Borrow's Lavengro… and, of course, it fits perfectly into the pattern of my current reading! - Fallada and Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives Tale, i. e. my constant musings on the nineteenth century. I was amazed to learn from Bennett's book that in Papa's childhood you could watch an execution, which was a public entertainment, a real show, with high prices paid for windows with a good view, and the local hotels doing a roaring trade.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

Books, Learning, Reading, Childhood

“He was the great prose satirist of the Elizabethan period and may rightly be considered as the forerunner of that much greater satirist whose Tale of a Tub was a brilliant attack upon all forms of religious controversy.”

Martin Marprelate (1588–1589)

Sir Adolphus William Ward and Alfred Rayney Waller (eds.) The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-21), vol. 3, ch. 17, sect. 16. http://www.bartleby.com/213/1716.html Criticism

“I'm not going to vote. I won't vote for a Catholic and I won't vote for a damned Republican. Maybe I've said that before. My ancestors were all Catholic and not very far back. And I have reason to hate the church.
I feel a curious kinship, though, with the Middle Ages. I have been more successful in selling tales laid in that period of time, than in any other. Truth it was an epoch for strange writers. Witches and werewolves, alchemists and necromancers, haunted the brains of those strange savage people, barbaric children that they were, and the only thing which was never believed was the truth. Those sons of the old pagan tribes were wrought upon by priest and monk, and they brought all their demons from their mythology and accepted all the demons of the new creed also, turning their old gods into devils. The slight knowledge which filtered through the monastaries from the ancient sources of decayed Greece and fallen Rome, was so distorted and perverted that by the time it reached the people, it resembled some monstrous legend. And the vague minded savages further garbed it in heathen garments. Oh, a brave time, by Satan! Any smooth rogue could swindle his way through life, as he can today, but then there was pageantry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living.
I hate the devotees of great wealth but I enjoy seeing the splendor that wealth can buy. And if I were wealthy, I'd live in a place with marble walls and marble floors, lapis lazulis ceilings and cloth-of-gold and I would have silver fountains in the courts, flinging an everlasting sheen of sparkling water in the air. Soft low music should breathe forever through the rooms and slim tigerish girls should glide through on softly falling feet, serving all the wants of me and my guests; girls with white bare limbs like molten gold and soft dreamy eyes.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Harold Preece (received October 20, 1928)
Letters

Life, God, Hate, Children

“You ask a thing ill-suited to my years, to yours both offensive and disgusting. For how can it become me, who am near forty, to write of love, or you, that are in your fifties, to read of it That is a subject which delights young minds, and demands a tender heart. Old men are as fitted to tales of love as young men are to tales of prudence. Nor is there anything uglier than old age pursuing love, but lacking strength. Certainly you will sometimes find old men in love,—loved again, never; matrons and girls alike despise old age. No man’s love will hold a woman, but his whom she has seen in the flower of his youth. And if you hear aught to the contrary, there’s a lie behind it. Indeed I know, to write of love does not beseem me, who have already passed the noonday of life and am carried on towards evening; but it dishonours you who ask no less than me who write.”

Pope Pius II book The Tale of Two Lovers

Source: The Tale of Two Lovers, 1444, p. xvii, preface (in 1933 edition)

Love, Life, Men, Lie

“Many pages of Prokofiev’s oeuvre continue the important tradition of Russian music based on fairy tale–inspired imagery.”

Boris Berman (1948) Russian/American musician

Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Prokofiev the pianist

Music

“The real story of how the west was won bears little resemblance to the storybook accounts handed down to generations of young Americans. Behind the facade of frontier heroism and cowboy bravado, of civilizing forces and homespun values, lies a quite different tale: a saga of ecocide and genocide, of forced enclosures of land and people, and the expropriation of an entire subcontinent for the exclusive benefit of a privileged few.”

Jeremy Rifkin book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture

Source: Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992), p. 107

People

“Regardless of how Revenge of the Sith is received at the box office, it represents the conclusion to an unparalleled cinematic achievement. Finally, after 28 long years of waiting that were only occasionally punctuated by the appearance of new story fragments, Lucas has ended with an exclamation point. The tale of a galaxy long ago and far away is complete. Only now can we truly step back and admire the full tapestry that it has taken George Lucas and his ILM wizards nearly three decades to weave.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/s/sw2005.html of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005). Three-and-a-half star reviews

Revenge, Appearance, Waiting, Box

“Awake, awake, my Lyre!
And tell thy silent master's humble tale
In sounds that may prevail;
Sounds that gentle thoughts inspire:
Though so exalted she
And I so lowly be
Tell her, such different notes make all thy harmony.”

Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) British writer

Poem: A Supplication http://www.bartleby.com/106/102.html.

“Prostrate on earth the bleeding warrior lies,
And Isr'el's beauty on the mountains dies.
How are the mighty fallen!
Hush'd be my sorrow, gently fall my tears,
Lest my sad tale should reach the alien's ears:
Bid Fame be dumb, and tremble to proclaim
In heathen Gath, or Ascalon, our shame
Lest proud Philistia, lest our haughty foe,
With impious scorn insult our solemn woe.”

William Somervile (1675–1742) English poet

The Lamentation of David over Saul and Jonathan.

Sadness, Beauty, Mountain, Tear

“I send thee a shell from the ocean-beach;
But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech.
Hold to thine ear
And plain thou'lt hear
Tales of ships.”

Charles Henry Webb (1834–1905) American poet

With a Nantucket Shell, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Gather a shell from the strewn beach / And listen at its lips: they sigh / The same desire and mystery, / The echo of the whole sea's speech", Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Sea Hints; The hollow sea-shell, which for years hath stood / On dusty shelves, when held against the ear / Proclaims its stormy parent, and we hear / The faint, far murmur of the breaking flood. / We hear the sea. The Sea? It is the blood / In our own veins, impetuous and near", Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Sonnet. Sea-shell Murmurs'.

“God save King Robert! then, say I," vociferated Alan, eagerly grasping the knight's hand. "Sit, sit, Sir Knight; and for the love of heaven, speak more of this most wondrous tale. Erewhile, we hear of this goodly Earl of Carrick at Edward's court, doing him homage, serving him as his own English knight, and now in Scotland--aye, and Scotland's king. How may we reconcile these contradictions?”

Grace Aguilar (1816–1847) Novelist, writer

Source: The Days of Bruce, Vol. 1, Chapter I

Love, God

“Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Associated Press interview (2003) http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3404272/ 2000s

Life, Knowledge, Reality

“A woman and a mouse, they carry a tale wherever they go.”

Gelett Burgess (1866–1951) artist, art critic, poet, author and humorist

Gelett Burgess, The Maxims of Methuselah (1907).

“So mourn'd the dame of Ephesus her love,
And thus the soldier arm'd with resolution
Told his soft tale, and was a thriving wooer.”

Colley Cibber Richard III

Act II, scene 1.
Richard III (altered) (1700)

Love

“I think the greatest oxymoron on the face of this earth is to use the word 'science' along with 'evolution'. Evolution's a fairy tale for grown ups… It's unprovable, it's not been proved.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

AronRa vs Ray Comfort (September 17th, 2012), Radio Paul's Radio Rants

Thinking, Science

“All versions written for nonscientists speak of fused males as the curious tale of the anglerfish—just as we so often hear about the monkey swinging through the trees, or the worm burrowing through soil. But if nature teaches us any lesson, it loudly proclaims life's diversity. There ain't no such abstraction as the clam, the fly, or the anglerfish. Ceratioid anglerfishes come in nearly 100 species, and each has its own peculiarity.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Big Fish, Little Fish", p. 29
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Life, Nature, Tree, Flying

“Anyone who intends to present a new story must approach the problem in a new way and speak so persuasively that the tale brings pleasure to people.”

Marie de France Milun

Ki divers cunte veut traitier,
Diversement deit comencier
E parler si rainablement
K'il seit pleisibles a la gent.
"Milun", line 1; p. 97.
Lais

People, Pleasure, Way, Problem

“I must warn you that Gurdjieff is far more of an enigma than you can imagine. I am certain that he is deeply good, and that he is working for the good of mankind. But his methods are often incomprehensible. For example, he uses disgusting language, especially to ladies who are likely to be squeamish about such things. He has the reputation of behaving shamelessly over money matters, and with women also. At his table we have to drink spirits, often to the point of drunkenness. People have said that he is a magician, and that he uses his powers for his own ends… I do not believe that the scandalous tales told of Gurdjieff are true: but you must take into account that they may be true and act accordingly.”

John G. Bennett (1897–1974) British mathematician and author

John G. Bennett (1974) Witness: The Autobiography of John G. Bennett. Tucson: Omen Press, p. 244. Cited in: " Controversial reputation http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/pdf/negative.pdf" on gurdjiefffourthway.org, accessed 2013-04-21

Women, Money, People, Imagination

“In response to the plummeting popularity of the Administration itself, revealed at Newbury and in the shire county elections, we have the Prime Minister's botched reshuffle. If we were to offer that tale of events to the BBC light entertainment department as a script for a programme, I think that the producers of "Yes, Minister" would have turned it down as hopelessly over the top. It might have even been too much for "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'em". The tragedy for us all is that it is really happening— it is fact, not fiction. The man with the non-Midas touch is in charge. It is no wonder that we live in a country where the Grand National does not start and hotels fall into the sea.”

John Smith (1938–1994) Labour Party leader from Scotland (1938-1994)

Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199293/cmhansrd/1993-06-09/Debate-1.html, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 226, col. 292. House of Commons speech, 9 June 1993. That year's Grand National horse race had been declared void after a start-line mishap. The Holbeck Hall Hotel in Scarborough began to fall into the sea on 3 June 1993 due to coastal erosion.

Thinking, Light, Sea, Country

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

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book II, p. 48