Folktales Quotes

• Things, very strange things, happen in folktales and there is never much attention given to the whys and wherefores.

  Marisa Silver

  Attention, Strange, Given

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.

  Joseph Campbell

  Soul, Language

  Joseph Campbell (1969). “The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Once upon a time, I thought faeries lived only in books, old folktales, and the past. That was before they burst upon my life as vibrant, luminous beings, permeating my art and my everyday existence, causing glorious havoc.

  Brian Froud

  Art, Book, Past

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• History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Truth, People, Stories

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• Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. . . .

  Steven Tyler

  Wife, Once Upon A Time, Stories

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• I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.

  Robin McKinley

  Culture, Levels, Grassroots

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• The protagonist of folktale is always, and intensely, a young person moving through ordeals into adult life. . . . and this is why there are no wicked stepchildren in the tales.

  Jill Paton Walsh

  Moving, Wicked, Adults

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• After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?

  Tad Williams

  Profound, Bending, World

  Tad Williams (2002). “Otherland 4: Sea of Silver Light”, p.584, Penguin

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• But this is a story, and in a story there is always someone beautiful enough." - 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Beautiful, Girl, Two

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• Not surprisingly, thinkers from groups for whom whiteness was and is a problem have taken the lead in studying whiteness in this way. Such study began with slave folktales and American Indian stories of contact with whites.

  David Roediger

  Taken, Groups, Stories

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• While writing Cold Mountain, I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic.

  Charles Frazier

  Clever, Writing, Two

  "Week three: Charles Frazier on writing Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier, www.theguardian.com. September 30, 2011.

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• In The Jack Daniels Sessions, folktales and modern landscapes collide, exploding and reforming in the form of an intriguing and intelligent collection. Cotman seizes the stories of tired tradition and galvanizes them, setting them to dance for us in wonderful, new interpretations.

  Cat Rambo

  Tired, Intelligent, Stories

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