Sagas Quotes

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may - need is the word I use - to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. ~ Roger Ebert

The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty, and rape. Many ancient works do that - The Iliad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling the Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their ~ Richard Dawkins

At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sunburned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It's great to be an Intrepid Voyager. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Family and dysfunction went together like peanut butter and jelly. Family sagas. Everything would be okay. But how? ~ Diana Y. Paul

Kvothe continued, smiling himself "I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity's sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance." His smile broadened. "Mine. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character ~ Roland Barthes

It was Edward Lear who created the original limerick, and is credited with A Book of Nonsense (1846). Apparently, he did this to amuse his clients' children while they were waiting for their parents' having portraits painted. Edward Lear was an artist first and a poet last. How strange then that we remember him mostly for limericks?
Since writing many of these little jocular verses, I have noticed a strange effect that keeps you reading: each time you read one limerick, you just cannot help reading the next, especially when they are nicely set out on a page. I am particularly proud of my lim-sagas, of which only two are contained in this book, but I consider them the best of my collection. ~ Bernie Morris

Today the children of our public schools are taught more of the history, heroes, legends, and sagas of the old world than of the land of their birth, while they are furnished with little material on the people and institutions that are truly American. ~ Luther Standing Bear

My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic. ~ Frances Hardinge

As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, "You're going to die, you know." However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity. ~ Thomas Ligotti

It was Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward.

Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you'll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like it had existed before. It was thrillingly new to see a young, gutsy, kick-ass female hero, for starters, and one who was no Amazonian Wonder Woman but recognizably ordinary, fussing about her nails, her shoes, and whether she'd make it to her high school prom. Buffy's story contained a heady mix of many genres (fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, detective fiction, high school drama), all of it leavened with tongue-in-cheek humor yet underpinned by the serious care with which the Buffy universe had been crafted. Back then, Whedon's dizzying genre hopping was a radical departure from the norm-whereas today, post-Buffy, no one blinks an eye as writers of urban fantasy leap across genre boundaries with abandon, penning tender romances featuring werewolves and demons, hard-boiled detective novels with fairies, and vampires-in-modern-life sagas that can crop up darn near anywhere: on the horror shelves, the SF shelves, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves. ~ Ellen Datlow

Why vampires? You write centuries-long family sagas - why not write historical epics without any hint of the supernatural?"

"Well, that would be boring, wouldn't it?"

"Yeah, God only knows what Tolstoy was thinking. ~ Carrie Vaughn

Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas, The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space. (Cape Hatteras ~ Hart Crane

A personal story of the horrors that Poles lived through during World War II. When God Looked the Other Way, above all else, explains why there is still a Poland ... One of the most remarkable World War II sagas I have ever read. It is history with a human face. ~ Arnold Beichman

Derian pulled the blanket snug around himself. "This is my added assurance."

Eena wrinkled her nose as if she thought his answer was odder than his actions. "It's your what?"

"If you recall the last time we were here standing in this very spot, you pelted me with neumberries." He held up a single berry before popping it into his mouth. "I doubt you would risk soiling your blanket, so I figure wrapping it around me this way I'm pretty much assured safety from any potential attack."

He winked playfully, and she laughed out loud.

"I'm afraid you don't know me half as well as you think," she announced. Aiming low, she flung a sizable berry at his calf. It hit its mark.

"Whoa, whoa!" He lowered the blanket to cover his legs.

"You can't hide yourself entirely, Derian," she said, aiming for his face. He ducked, raising the blanket like a shield in the process.

Another round of ammunition pelted his ankles before he decided it was time to fight back. Eena found herself bound up in her own blanket, arms wrapped securely at her sides. She laughed nonstop, unable to move within his strong hold. Derian leaned forward until their noses touched, and then he kissed her giggles silent. He kept her in the blanket, snug and close to him, but Eena managed to wriggle an arm free and drape it around his neck, holding his lips in reach. She uttered a quick count in between kisses.

"Seven," she breathed.
Richelle E. Goodrich

For the house of Dunraven, the ravens represented a spiritual claim to the Tower for the Celtic, especially the Welsh, people. For the English, the ravens represented the colorful savagery of their ancestors, which, however, testified to the exalted state of civilization they had since achieved. The national sagas of the Welsh and English gradually blended in tall tales told to tourists by Yeoman Warders, to eventually create a national myth. The romanticized past of Wales, predicated on survival, was fused with that of England, predicated on progress and conquest, to create a legend of Britain. ~ Boria Sax

I read American sagas (of the west) and I do not see people who went in search of material things. I see people who wrote down that what they sought was an escape from an old world which dictated their conscience and established their merit based on who their parents. ~ Alan Keyes

The idea of a secret that will be revealed always results in one of two scenarios: death and destruction, or self-discovery and recovery beyond our wildest dreams of unification. And in the greatest of sagas, both at the same time. ~ Mary Ruefle

Sagas wouldn't be interesting if terrible things didn't happen to the people in them. ~ Jack Campbell

We think that it's the big moments that define our lives-the wedding, the baby, the new house, the dream job. But really, these big moments of happiness are just the punctuation marks of our personal sagas. The narrative is written every day in the small, the simple, and the common. In your tiny choices, in these tiny changes. In the unconsidered. The overlooked. The discarded. The reclaimed. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under a spell, men who had been turned into birds or even more likely into some strange beast, and who bore their magic shapes with the same unflurried equanimity, magnanimity, and dignity that we children had marvelled at the beasts of fairy tale. Did they not suspect, moreover, with the wordless apprehension of animals, that if their magic shapes were to be stripped from them the fairy tale would be at an end and their security gone, too, while real life would begin with all it's problems, perhaps in some town where there was neither nature or mirage, no link with the folk-tale and the past, no ancient path to the far side of the mountains and down to the river gullies and out beyond the grass plains, no landmarks from the Sagas? - Only a restless search for sterile, deadening enjoyment. ~ Halldor Laxness

Vengeance is a strange human motivation
it can drive a man to do things which he neither would nor could achieve without it ... and because of that it lies behind some of the greatest sagas of human literature! ~ H. Beam Piper

Museums should no longer concern themselves with history on a grand scale, the sagas of kings and heroes, or the forging of national identities; they should focus instead on the lives and belongings of ordinary people, just as modern novels do. ~ Orhan Pamuk

The Danes had a great love of sea stories and the old sagas. Snorri provided the former from personal experience and Kara the latter from her vast store of such trivia. I half-thought some of the duke's men would volunteer to join the Undoreth and travel with the Vikings such was the level of worship on display ... ~ Mark Lawrence

Not all series books are sagas. Some are shaped more like beads on a string, separate episodes held together by a set of characters, who may or may not grow and change as the series continues. ~ Katharine Kerr

After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

How tall is it?" [The Harps]
"according to the sagas, it links through time and space and keeps our world and your world tethered together"
"Pretty big, then ~ Kathryn James

DEAR DI­ARY
You are greater than the Bible
And the Con­fer­ence of the Birds
And the Up­an­ishads
All put to­geth­er
You are more se­vere
Than the Scrip­tures
And Ham­mura­bi's Code
More dan­ger­ous than Luther's pa­per
Nailed to the Cathe­dral door
You are sweet­er
Than the Song of Songs
Might­ier by far
Than the Epic of Gil­gamesh
And braver
Than the Sagas of Ice­land
I bow my head in grat­itude
To the ones who give their lives
To keep the se­cret
The dai­ly se­cret
Un­der lock and key
Dear Di­ary
I mean no dis­re­spect
But you are more sub­lime
Than any Sa­cred Text
Some­times just a list
Of my events
Is holi­er than the Bill of Rights
And more in­tense ~ Leonard Cohen

I was weaned not on television or Wild West sagas but on stories of nationalism and patriotism. I would sit at my mother's feet by the hour and drink in these exciting tales of the freedom fighters in our family. ~ Sukarno

The very odd thing about sagas [ ... ] is that they very rarely mention dry mouths and full bladders. ~ David Gemmell

I ploughed the land with horses,
But my heart was ill at ease,
For the old seafaring men
Came to me now and then,
With their sagas of the seas. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Zach had been on the receiving end of a few of Lanning's ass-chewings back in the day. They were epic sagas of righteous fury and perfectly applied touches of profanity. It was like being verbally disemboweled. ~ Christopher Farnsworth

I read a bit of the Icelandic sagas. They're fascinating in that they are completely ordinary. The farmer will go off into the hills and fight a troll, and then go back and do ordinary things. It's an odd mix of fantasy and reality. ~ Jonathan Stroud

Many are brave but do not redden their sword in the chest of another. ~ Egil's Saga

It usually takes me about three years to research and write one of my historical sagas; this is one reason why I take medieval mystery breaks, for they can be completed in only a year. ~ Sharon Kay Penman

It was not hard to believe a beautiful woman capable of murder, Margret thought.As it says in the sagas, Opt er flago i fogru skinni. A witch often has fair skin. ~ Hannah Kent

The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas. ~ Philippe Grimbert

The exuberant exaggerations of the Irish sagas are not for the northern gods; Freyja, Thor, Loki have the robust common sense which the Vikings themselves admired hugely, ~ Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson

My ears become my conduit to the world. In the darkness I listen - to thrillers, to detective novels, to romances; to family sagas, potboilers and historical novels; to ghost stories and classic fiction and chick lit; to bonkbusters and history books. I listen to good books and bad books, great books and terrible books; I do not discriminate. Steadily, hour after hour, in the darkness I consume them all. ~ Anna Lyndsey

All medieval and classic cultures of the ancient world, including those on which Tolkien modeled his elves, routinely exposed their young and marriageable women to the fortunes of war, because bearing and raising the next generation of warriors is not needed for equality-loving elves.
Equality-loving elves. Who are monarchists. With a class system. Of ranks.
Battles are more fun when attractive young women are dismembered and desecrated by goblins! I believe that this is one point where C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and all Christian fantasy writers from before World War Two were completely agreed upon, and it is a point necessary in order correctly to capture the mood and tone and nuance of the medieval romances or Norse sagas such writers were straining their every artistic nerve and sinew to create.
So, wait, we have an ancient and ageless society of elves where the virgin maidens go off to war, but these same virgin maidens must abide by the decision of their father or liege lord for permission to marry?
-- The Desolation of Tolkien ~ John C. Wright

One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, - to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to collect sagas and heap cairns. This instinct as to the enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization. ~ John Jay Chapman

If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history. ~ A.S. Byatt

I love those books like 'Gone with the Wind,' the huge, sweeping family sagas. ~ M.K. Hobson