Keith David Quotes

Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

I like using traditional beliefs in my fantasies, even though I always end up warping them to suit my purpose: it somehow makes everything feel more 'solid' if it's got a long history behind it.

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.

I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart.

Stories always seem to get better with age.

Seeing that picture, for me, was like Chartres Cathedral.

Most of the monsters... are based on some sort of mythology. Every culture and even some geographical areas have monsters and mythology that is their own.

When our ancestors crouched about the camp fire at night, they told each other tales of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels, to hold back the terrors of the night. Such tales comforted and entertained, diverted and educated those who listened, and helped shape their sense of the world and their place in it.

Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present.

One of the great advantages of the study of old Norse or Icelandic literature is the insight given by it into the origin of world-wide superstitions. Norse tradition is transparent as glacier ice, and its origin is as unmistakable.

One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That's where the old stuff came from.

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

Myths and legends die hard in America.

The great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

The worlds of folklore and religion were so mingled in early twentieth venture German culture that even families who didn't go to church were often deeply Christian.

After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth'.

Real myths are often strange and startlingly unfamiliar, and don't always give up their meanings easily; you have to tease them out, and for me, that's one of the pleasures of reading older collections of lore.

Vampires are make-believe, like elves, gremlins, and eskimos.

Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.

Anyone who doesn't belive in Faeries, isn't worth knowing.