Folklore Quotes

Their term project consists of a fieldwork collection of folklore that they create by interviewing family members, friends, or anyone they can manage to persuade to serve as an informant.

Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.

The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.

Every great story seems to begin with a snake.

I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

Just so you know, when they say "once upon a time"....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

At the heart of every legend there is a grain of truth.

A proverb is one man’s wit and all men’s wisdom.

A myth is a lie that conceals or reveals a truth. But if it reveals even a strand of history or truth, that's what gets my adrenaline going.

Tons of folktales have to do with hares and witches. Basically, witches all over Europe turn into hares and are able to do malevolent things in the form of a hare. It goes back to the great god Pan. Pan is, if we're going to do archetypal projections, related to the Christian Satan, but as a child, Pan was wrapped in a hare's hide.

Out of monuments, names, words proverbs ...and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.

People still love a good story, and I don't think that will change.

I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

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

Witches were part of my imaginary childhood playground, so I wanted to make an archetypal fairytale about the mythic idea of what New England was to me as a kid.

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.

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.

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

There is a lot of contradictions of mermaids as a symbol. I'm always interested in contradictions.

A nation that has no music and no fairytales is a tragedy.

Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands were bloodstained - if you ate animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.

It's important to tell stories, and it's a worthwhile thing to do.

Frankenstein feels like an ancient tale, the kind of traditional story that appears in many other forms. It appeals to something very primal, but it's also about profound things, the very nature of life and death and birth - about, essentially, a man who is resisting the most irresistible fact of all, that we will be shuffling off this mortal coil.