Fable Quotes

Do we really know what the past was, what actually happened, or is history “a fable” not quite “agreed upon”? Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”

People love a good story, even if it's a story that has very little truth to it.

Setting a movie in an earlier age gives it a mythical quality.

Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.

Some stories are true that never happened.

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

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

I've never worked out what the moral of Humpty Dumpty is. I can only think of: Don't sit on a wall, if you're an egg.

Just so you know, when they say "Once upon a time” . . . they’re lying

When I was growing up in the Philippines, the story that was read to me most was Pinocchio.

Eilmer ... was a man learned for those times ..., and in his youth had hazarded a deed of remarkable boldness. He had by some means, I scarcely know what, fastened wings to his hands and feet so that, mistaking fable for truth, he might fly like Daedalus, and, collecting the breeze on the summit of a tower, he flew for more than the distance of a furlong. But, agitated by the violence of the wind and the swirling of air, as well as by awareness of his rashness, he fell, broke his legs, and was lame ever after. He himself used to say that the cause of his failure was forgetting to put a tail on the back part.

As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.

The most powerful words in English are, 'Tell me a story.'

From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.

A certain class of novels may with propriety be called fables.

There was an old man with a beard, who said: 'It is just as I feared! Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren have all built their nests in my beard.

Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

The American public is a very specialized public. The reason it is taken as a realistic film is because inside the fable, I've put that kind of reality in. And it could easily be called, instead of Once Upon a Time in America, Once Upon a Time There Was a Certain Kind of Cinema. Because it was also an homage to cinema.

For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.

I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.

Mama used to tell us a story about a cicada sitting high in a tree. It chirps and drinks in dew, oblivious to the praying mantis behind it. The mantis arches up its front leg to stab the cicada, but it doesn't know an oriole perches behind it. The bird stretches out its neck to snap up the mantis for a midday meal, but its unaware of the boy who's come into the garden with a net. Three creatures—the cicada, the mantis and the oriole—all coveted gains without being aware of the greater and inescapable danger that was coming.

At Length the Fox turnes Monk.

The artist is the child in the popular fable, every one of whose tears was a pearl.

I think storytelling is storytelling. It doesn't matter what format it's shot on.