Ian Brown Quotes

Our literary culture is marinated in deep traditions of the fantastic and the supernatural, and we export those rich qualities in films and books on a spectacular industrial scale.

Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories.

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.

The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.

People have always had a fascination with the supernatural going back to the beginning of time and with vampires in particular. This phenomenon is not new.

Don't name it, as they say, because instantly you offer it to this peculiar authority.

Miracles are doomed; they will drop out like fairies and witchcraft, from among the matter which serious people believe.

The Isle of Man managed to slip through a crack in the space-time continuum...fallen off the back of the history lorry to lie amnesiac in the road to progress...its main industry is money (laundering, pressing, altering and mending)...The weather’s foul, the food’s medieval, it’s covered in suicidal motorists and folk who believe in fairies

Do you know what they say about big hands? Big gloves!

I'll seek a four leaved shamrock in all thy fairy dells, And if I find the charmed leaves, oh, how I'll weave my spells!

Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them.

A woman hath nine lives like a cat.

To fight the raven you may make alliance with the serpent until the battle is done.

No man of sense in the whole world believes in devils any more than he does in mermaids, vampires, gorgons, hydras, naiads, dryads, nymphs, fairies, the Fountain of Youth, [or] the Philosopher's Stone. . . .

When you once attribute effects to the will of a personal God, you have let in a lot of little gods and evils - then sprites, fairies, dryads, naiads, witches, ghosts and goblins, for your imagination is reeling, riotous, drunk, afloat on the flotsam of superstition. What you know then doesn't count. You just believe, and the more your believe the more do you plume yourself that fear and faith are superior to science and seeing.

We call them faerie. We don't believe in them. Our loss.

There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past.

It wasn't for nothing that the raven was just now croaking on my left hand.

The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it.

Crosses?" "Definitely" "Why?" "Because they're evil, soulless, bloodsucking fiends?" "So was my sixth-grade gym teacher, but he wasn't afraid of a cross.

No doves come from ravens’ eggs

Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people's lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day.

It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.

I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy, and the resurrection of the dead. I had deja vu many times each day. I was thirteen.