Tales Quotes - Page 10

• Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth.

  Joseph Addison

  Moon, Listening, Stories

  Joseph Addison, Richard Hurd, Henry George Bohn (1872). “The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison”, p.485

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• When I started writing Tales of the City I was one year away from being a mental illness. It wasn't until 1975 that the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses - and in many states, including the state of North Carolina where I grew up, homosexuality was a crime. An arrestable crime. It still is, in many parts of the world.

  Armistead Maupin

  Writing, Years, Cities

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• But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

  Zadie Smith

  Lying, Past, Perfect

  Zadie Smith (2000). “White teeth”

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• Fairy tales have always got to have something a bit scary for children - as long as you make them laugh as well.

  Roald Dahl

  Children, Long, Laughing

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• I now want to tell three stories about advances in twentieth-century physics. A curious fact emerges in these tales: time and again physicists have been guided by their sense of beauty not only in developing new theories but even in judging the validity of physical theories once they are developed. Simplicity is part of what I mean by beauty, but it is a simplicity of ideas, not simplicity of a mechanical sort that can be measured by counting equations or symbols.

  Steven Weinberg

  Beauty, Art, Mean

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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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• M. J. Putney has created true magic with this book, the kind that comes when you curl up in a comfortable armchair and let the story take your imagination away. Come visit an enchanted eighteenth-century England and meet two desperate lovers caught in the web of a sinister lord with great magical power. Romantic and lyrical, this tale will fill your reading time with pleasure. I loved it.

  Catherine Asaro

  Book, Reading, Two

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• These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.

  Diane Arbus

  Photography, Character, Lovely

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• THE HEIR OF NIGHT by Helen Lowe is a richly told tale of strange magic, dark treachery and conflicting loyalties, set in a well realized world.

  Robin Hobb

  Loyalty, Dark, Night

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• Ireland is where strange tales begin and happy endings are possible.

  Charles Haughey

  Ireland And The Irish, Strange, Happy Endings

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• The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.

  Martin Gardner

  Book, Levels, Lasts

  Introduction to "The Annotated Alice. The Definitive Edition" by Lewis Carroll, 1999.

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• The Blood of Heroes is surely the best account to date, one that presents plenty of new insights while acting as a corrective-or at least an alternative viewpoint-to previous accounts....Donovan combines that vital blend of authoritative scholarship with the vivid writing necessary to make an oft-told tale seem fresh.

  William C. Davis

  Hero, Writing, Blood

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• Community connectedness is not just about warm fuzzy tales of civic triumph. In measurable and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference in our lives...Social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.

  Robert D. Putnam

  Life, Change, Differences

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• The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

  Marc Bloch

  Lying, History, Giants

  Marc Bloch (1992). “The Historian's Craft”, p.22, Manchester University Press

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• I get an incredible thrill and satisfaction from seeing somebody with Apple’s tell-tale white earbuds. But I’m constantly haunted by thoughts of, is it good enough? Is there any way we could have made it better?

  Jonathan Ive

  White, Apples, Thrill

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• Though aware that there is nothing in the universe that suggests any purpose for humanity, one way that we can find a purpose is to study the universe by the methods of science, without consoling ourselves with fairy tales about its future, or about our own.

  Steven Weinberg

  Humanity, Atheism, Way

  Steven Weinberg (2012). “Lake Views”, p.45, Harvard University Press

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• The fabliau, then, is a short story that is a tall story. It combines a burly blurting of dirty words with a reveling in humiliations that are good unclean fun. A popular venture that is keen to paste—épater—everybody (not just the bourgeoisie), it is the art of the single entendre. Highly staged low life, it guffaws at the pious, the prudish, and the priggish. High cockalorum versus high decorum…. The introduction here, like the translator’s note, tells well the story of the comic tales, anonymous for the most part, usually two or three hundred lines long, of which about 160 exist.

  Christopher Ricks

  Art, Fun, Dirty

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• All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

  Ivan Chtcheglov

  Wall, Moving, Writing

  Guy Debord, Ivan Chtcheglov, Asger Jorn, Raoul Vaneigem, Mustapha Khayati (2014). “Situationism: A Compendium”, p.5, Bread and Circuses Publishing

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• Contrary to what many may think, immortality is not a fairy tale invented to compensate for an unhappy life.

  Stephen R. Lawhead

  Happy Life, Thinking, Unhappy

  Stephen R. Lawhead (2013). “The Bone House: A Bright Empires Novel, Book 2”, p.191, Lion Fiction

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• ONE BLOOD is a richly detailed, intricately woven tale rendered in lush, evocative prose. This memorable debut heralds Qwantu Amaru as a talent well worth watching.

  Brandon Massey

  Memorable, Blood, Woven

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• A Chinese tale tells of some men sent to harm a young girl who, upon seeing her beauty, become her protectors rather than her violators. That's how I felt seeing the Earth for the first time. I could not help but love and cherish her.

  Taylor Wang

  Love, Girl, Men

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• Life is not at all what you might think it to be
  A simple tale where each thing has its history
  It's much more than its scuffle and anything goes
  Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.

  John Ashbery

  Inspirational, Life, Thinking

  John Ashbery (1986). “Selected Poems”, Penguin Group USA

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• Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.

  Marina Warner

  Mother, Men, Maps

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• Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called ‘erotika pathemata’ by the Greeks - tales of erotic suffering.

  Marina Warner

  Romance, Greek, Erotic

  Marina Warner (2015). “L'Atalante”, p.16, Palgrave Macmillan

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• Winning an award is a great feeling but winning the Vodafone Crossword Popular Choice Award is particularly exhilarating because it is based upon public voting. I find it a strange quirk of fate that Chanakya's Chant, a political tale, should end up winning an election!

  Ashwin Sanghi

  Fate, Winning, Awards

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