Folk Narratives Quotes

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.

They say a story loses something with each telling.

Any consideration of the story we call 'Cinderella' for simplicity's sake must acknowledge that 'Cinderella' has had a dizzying array of personae over hundreds of years, in several cultures. There is no one authoritative tale of 'Cinderella,' only a hall of mirrors with a different face in each reflection.

Once upon a time fairy tales were told to audiences of young and old alike. It is only in the last century that such tales were deemed fit only for small children, stripped of much of their original complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten and delight.

I wished that, for once, faery tales – real faery tales, not Disney fairy tales – would have a happy ending.

The storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don't know where it arose, but it's still there. You can't go to the feed store, or the country courthouse without running into storytellers.

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.

A yokel mind loves stories from of old, Being the kind it can repeat and hold.

Up to 1870, it was equally said of France and of Italy that they possessed no folk-tales. Yet, within fifteen years from that date, over 1000 tales had been collected in each country.

What I like about fairy tales is the language and the matter-of-fact way of introducing magic, where it's accepted that a fox could talk or a gate could just appear in a wall. I think fairy tales are so psychological.

Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.