Folklore And Mythology Quotes

Folklore and mythology, as well as man's catastrophic disregard for nature, are the meat of Joseph D'Lacey's horror. But the prime cuts are always compassion and surprise. ~ Adam Nevill

I've loved fairytales, folklore and mythology since I was a small child, and I think it was inevitable that they would influence my style and my development of stories. ~ Juliet Marillier

If you read folklore and mythology, any kind of myths, any kind of tall tales, running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor. It's only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain. ~ Christopher McDougall

Part of me felt like I was throwing my life away, for a guy I barely knew. But I wasn't just doing it for him. Since my parents died, I'd had absolutely no control over my life. If I really thought about it, maybe I'd given up control long before - that day in Oregon when I almost drowned. Since then, I'd always relied on others to take care of me. Maybe it was time to take my life back into my own hands… even if it meant growing fins. ~ D.S. Murphy

I think airports are places of huge human drama. The more I see of it, the more I am convinced that Heathrow is a secret city, with its own history, folklore and mythology. But what has surprised me is the love the people who work there feel for the place. Everyone seems to think they are plugged into something majestic. ~ Tony Parsons

I took physics, and lo and behold, there's a lot of physics in 'Lost.' I think for most people, liberal arts educations are more abstract, but for me, it's been a chance to apply the things I've learned more directly. I also took some Folklore and Mythology classes, and I think that a lot of that influenced me. ~ Carlton Cuse

And you, Persephone... You were foretold, too. I never wanted anything-" her mouth moved softly, gently over my skin "-until I wanted you. ~ Sarah Diemer

For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work-or, if working, produce deviant effects-there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for 'meaning'. ~ Joseph Campbell

Did you recently turn into a jerk or have you been one since birth? ~ Priya Ardis

The prominent Egyptian government minister, university professor, and writer Taha Hussein ... devoted himself to the study of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry and ended up concluding that much of that body of work had been fabricated well after the establishment of Islam in order to lend outside support to Koranic mythology ... [T]he Iranian journalist and diplomat Ali Dashti ... repeatedly took his fellow Muslims to task for not questioning the traditional accounts of Muhammad's life, much of which he called myth-making and miracle-mongering. ~ Toby Lester

This is my love line ... It says an incredibly sexy, but totally infuriating redheaded woman with barge into my life and drive me insane. ~ Denise Grover Swank

Long ago, when faeries and men still wandered the earth as brothers, the MacLeod chief fell in love with a beautiful faery woman. They had no sooner married and borne a child when she was summoned to return to her people. Husband and wife said a tearful goodbye and parted ways at Fairy Bridge, which you can still visit today. Despite the grieving chief, a celebration was held to honor the birth of the newborn boy, the next great chief of the MacLeods. In all the excitement of the celebration, the baby boy was left in his cradle and the blanket slipped off. In the cold Highland night he began to cry. The baby's cry tore at his mother, even in another dimension, and so she went to him, wrapping him in her shawl. When the nursemaid arrived, she found the young chief in the arms of his mother, and the faery woman gave her a song she insisted must be sung to the little boy each night. The song became known as "The Dunvegan Cradle Song," and it has been sung to little chieflings ever since. The shawl, too, she left as a gift: if the clan were ever in dire need, all they would have to do was wave the flag she'd wrapped around her son, and the faery people would come to their aid. Use the gift wisely, she instructed. The magic of the flag will work three times and no more.
As I stood there in Dunvegan Castle, gazing at the Fairy Flag beneath its layers of protective glass, it was hard to imagine the history behind it. The fabric was dated somewhere between the fourth and seventh ~ Signe Pike

It was the perfect set. Theseus gave a great war cry and brought his sword arcing up toward Sheba's throat - but the monster of the labyrinth lives inside us all. She is the dark, devouring hunger that is never sated, the creeping shadow that ever plays the fiend to our seraphim, the secret rage hidden in our hearts; deny her, and we become her slaves; fight her, and we make her invincible. By now, you must know that no monster can ever be killed, not really - […] ~ Troy Denning

- Maybe you're a succubus who hunts for my flesh? Or Mephistopheles, who hunts for my soul?
- Oh, no! I am much worse: succubus wants body, Mephistopheles wants soul, but I want you all, with your flesh and soul! ~ Bryanna Reid

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition. ~ Tim Schafer

Later times have laid all the blame upon the Goths and Vandals, but, however unwilling the partizans of the Christian system may be to believe or to acknowledge it, it is nevertheless true, that the age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.There was more knowledge in the world before that period, than for many centuries afterwards; and as to religious knowledge, the Christian system, as already said, was only another species of mythology; and the mythology to which it succeeded, was a corruption of an ancient system of theism.

It is owing to this long interregnum of science, and to no other cause, that we have now to look back through a vast chasm of many hundred years to the respectable characters we call the Ancients. Had the progression of knowledge gone on proportionably with the stock that before existed, that chasm would have been filled up with characters rising superior in knowledge to each other; and those Ancients we now so much admire would have appeared respectably in the background of the scene. But the christian system laid all waste; and if we take our stand about the beginning of the sixteenth century, we look back through that long chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy desert, in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills beyond. ~ Thomas Paine

And so Nat stood up and joined the group, and followed, and watched, and awaited his chance as the light of Chaos lit the plain and gods and demons marched to war. ~ Joanne Harris

There were the usual deaths, yes, those to be expected, people who started off celebrating and ended up killing each other, uncinematic deaths, deaths from the realm of folklore, not modernity: deaths that didn't scare anybody. ~ Roberto Bolano

Wrath: look at how their folklore portrays our species. There's Dracula for Christ's sake, an evil bloodsucker who preys on the defenseless. There's piss-poor B movies and porn. And don't get me started on the whole Halloween thing. Plastic fangs. Black capes. The only thing the idiots got right are that we drink blood and that we can't go out in daylight. The rest is bullshit, fabricated to alienate us and stimulate fear in the masses. Or just as offensive, the fiction used to create some kind of mystique for bored humans who think the dark side is a fun place to visit. ~ J.R. Ward

If we don't have a vigorous questioning, aggressive journalistic community and mythology, democracy itself is in great jeopardy. ~ Milton Glaser

Standing at the window, reading the menu of Obediah's services, the Minotaur wishes he could believe in what she has to offer: a promise woven into deep lines of his palm, some turn of fate told by a card. But faith is a nebulous thing and charlatans a dime a dozen; it's always been that way. The Minotaur both envies and pities the devout. ~ Steven Sherrill

We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people. ~ Bill Ayers

You and that amazing body of yours will be the cause of some too-appreciative witch's death. Maybe two witches." Or a dozen, her fire spirit hissed. ~ N.D. Jones

The door opens, and I turn my head, my heart thudding at the sight of Griffin. Tall, broad, muscular but sleek, he stalks into the room like a predator, his gait balanced and sure, his glittering, gray eyes focused entirely on me. Inky hair, a hawkish nose, that stubborn jaw, and thick, black stubble make him look hard and intimidating. With his sword strapped on and his dark brows lowered, he's a warlord on the prowl.
I shiver. I couldn't want him more. ~ Amanda Bouchet

In mythology and palmistry, the left hand is called the dreamer because the ring finger on the left hand leads directly to the heart. I find it a very poetic idea. And that's why I only wear nail polish on my left ring finger. ~ Gloria Vanderbilt

If I take off my clothes, I won't stop there, and if I touch you, it's over. Do you want me to claim you, princess? ~ Setta Jay

If there is any one person you can't love, then you don't understand love. The bitter cup we have to drink is the dregs of humility; we must see past the outer shells of insecurity to the seed of divinity deep inside each one of us.
No one virtue is strong enough to stand on its own. No one vice is simple enough not to lead to all others. No one person can appreciate and support us as much as we need. No one event is enough to tear apart our lives.
What does this all mean?
We have to give everything or we will have nothing. We cannot take any short cuts. We have to love everyone, or we cannot truly love anyone. No excuse will mean anything to us in the end.
People are beautiful, don't forget that.
Don't let pomp and circumstance, society or folklore fool you with counterfeit beauty.
True beauty is usually not something you can see, but something you feel; something that inspires you. ~ Michael Brent Jones

She was prepared for him to shut her down, when Behr shrugged a shoulder and said, "Yeah, sounds good. I think it's a good idea for you to get out of the house. But," he said, stepping back into the kitchen and leveling her with a hard look, "only if I tag along."
"What? Why?" Cheyenne questioned, not understanding the need for chaperones.
"Because it's safer that way," he reasoned. "I have a couple things to take care of first, so it will probably be a day or two. I expect you to wait for me, though, Cheyenne," he said, his brilliant blue eyes holding her in place. "It's safer that way."
She was preparing to argue when she realized that she wasn't altogether sure she wanted to venture out on her own yet anyway. It might be a shock to her system after locking herself away for so long. For laughs, she decided to give him a hard time anyway.
"But…" she started. He cut her off with an upraised hand.
"No buts," he said sternly. "It's not safe and you know it, and besides, that's what you have two strapping young men like us for." He clapped a grinning Dehstroy on the back.
Cheyenne threw her head back and laughed.
"You, young? Ha!"
"What?" Behr said, acting offended. "I'm young."
"Prove it," Cheyenne challenged. "Show me your birth certificate." When he pursed his lips, she laughed some more. "What's wrong? Didn't they make birth certificates yet when you were born? No?" She looked between the men, taking in their sheepish expres ~ Brandi Salazar

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me.
I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then ~ Alison Bechdel

They sent forth men to battle, But no such men return; And home, to claim their welcome, Come ashes in an urn ~ Aeschylus

I think of mythology as a function of biology; the energies of the body are the energies that move the imagination. These energies are the source, then, of mythological imagery; in a mythological organization of symbols, the conflicts between the different organic impulses within the body are resolved and harmonized. You might say mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life. ~ Joseph Campbell

Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn't trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he'd been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill.
I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class...
"Stories aren't real," he told me shortly. "They don't feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding 'family' in the nearest gang."
Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. "Write down the names of some books," she said. "Maybe we'll read them."
I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint – for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young live ~ Terri Windling

I huff. Sort of. "Well, would Your Logicalness care to take me to breakfast and tell me about his plans?"
… "Would your Nakedness care to get dressed first?" he asks. ~ Amanda Bouchet

Myths are what remain once the history of an event has been forgotten or lost to time. Myths are like the memory of one's first crush; the pain and longing one felt at that time is forgotten, but the warmth and sweetness of romance lives on, probably even magnified, larger in the imagination than it was in reality. ~ Shatrujeet Nath

I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed ... that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Her physical beauty had initially caught my attention, but it was her spirit that imprisoned my heart and soul forever. - Jonathan ~ Helen Boswell

When a judge walks into the room, and everybody stands up, you're not standing up to that guy, you're standing up to the robe that he's wearing and the role that he's going to play. What makes him worthy of that role is his integrity, as a representative of the principles of that role, and not some group of prejudices of his own. So what you're standing up to is a mythological character. I imagine some kings and queens are the most stupid, absurd, banal people you could run into, probably interested only in horses and women, you know. But you're not responding to them as personalities, you're responding to them in their mythological roles. When someone becomes a judge, or President of the United States, the man is no longer that man, he's the representative of an eternal office; he has to sacrifice his personal desires and even life possibilities to the role that he now signifies. ~ Joseph Campbell

As everyone who has read the Marxists critically has not failed to see ... the gospel of St. Marx is just the old Judaeo-Christian mythology with the supernatural sanctions left out, thus making the cult the most implausible and unreasonable of all the Christian heresies. It is true that there is reciprocal hostility between Marxists and the other Christian cults, but that is merely normal. Christian sects began persecuting each other even before one of them attained political power in the decaying Roman Empire, and everyone remembers the fearful Wars of Religion that convulsed and almost ruined Europe. The Gospel of Love invariably incites the most savage and blood-thirsty hatreds. ~ Revilo P. Oliver

There's a Greek legend - no, it's in something Plato wrote - about how true lovers are really two halves of the same person. It says that people wander around searching for their other half, and when they find him or her, they are finally whole and perfect. The thing that gets me is that the story says that originally all people were really pairs of people, joined back to back, and that some of the pairs were man and man, some woman and woman, and others man and woman. What happened was that all of these double people went to war with the gods, and the gods, to punish them, split them all in two. That's why some lovers are heterosexual and some are homosexual, female and female, or male and male. ~ Nancy Garden

Tolkien, then, was a philologist before he was a mythologist, and a mythologist, at least in intention, before he ever became a writer of fantasy fiction. His beliefs about language and about mythology were sometimes original and sometimes extreme, but never irrational, and he was able to express them perfectly clearly. In the end he decided to express them not through abstract argument, but by demonstration, and the success of the demonstration has gone a long way to showing that he did often have a point: especially in his belief, which I share, that a taste for philology, for the history of language in all its forms, names and place-names included, is much more widespread in the population at large than educators and arbiters of taste like to think. In his 1959 'Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford' (reprinted in Essays, pp. 224-40), Tolkien concluded that the problem lay not with the philologists nor with those they taught but with what he called 'misologists' – haters of the word. There would be no harm in them if they simply concluded language study was not for them, out of dullness or ignorance. But what he felt, Tolkien said, was:

"grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm; and anger when they have sought to impose the limitation of their minds upon younger minds, dissuading those with philological curiosity from their bent, encouraging those without this interest to believe that ~ Tom Shippey