Folklore Friendship Quotes

Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn’t trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he’d been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill. I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class... “Stories aren’t real,” he told me shortly. “They don’t feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding ‘family’ in the nearest gang.” Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. “Write down the names of some books,” she said. “Maybe we’ll read them.” I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint – for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young lives. Stories that use the power of myth to speak truth to the human heart. Charles de Lint creates a magical world that’s not off in a distant Neverland but here and now and accessible, formed by the “magic” of friendship, art, community, and social activism. Although most of his books have not been published specifically for adolescents and young adults, nonetheless young readers find them and embrace them with particular passion. I’ve long lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people from troubled backgrounds say that books by Charles saved them in their youth, and kept them going. Recently I saw that parole officer again, and I asked after his work. “Gets harder every year,” he said. “Or maybe I’m just getting old.” He stopped me as I turned to go. “That writer? That Charles de Lint? My wife got me to read them books…. Sometimes I pass them to the kids.” “Do they like them?” I asked him curiously. “If I can get them to read, they do. I tell them: Stories are important.” And then he looked at me and smiled.

I have never tried to symbolize our relationship by planting a bamboo as you might have supposed, naming my child or visiting her back. For me, she is above all typification and our relationship is immortal. And I hope to have freed her today.

A good life is never lived without a bit of risk, and this battle is well worth every one.

The career of libido, as Freud mapped it out, did more than explain the origins of neuroses, of perversions, and of normal erotic gratification. It also explained ways of feeling and modes of acting that had hitherto seemed quite remote from sexuality: the child's rage at its newborn sibling, the adolescent's volatile friendships, the spinster's unappeasable fear of sexual assault, the pacifist's bellicose love of peace, the fanatic's foaming proselytizing, the fat man's uncontrollable overeating. Beyond that, it could illuminate inquiries and activities, like folklore and history, art and politics, presumably innocent of erotic urges. Psychoanalysis first made it possible to think systematically about so comprehensive, complex and elusive a world of experience as bourgeois love, about the paths, and obstructions, to the confluence of its two currents.

In the years leading up to Hitler, many völkisch groups appeared in Germany; the English equivalent “folk” doesn’t quite convey the blend of mythology, folklore, legend, and nationalism that the German term suggests. Jung’s emphasis on history and myth, as well as his rejection of scientific materialism, made these groups sympathetic to his work, as opposed to Freud’s which, along with being Jewish, was reductionist. Although much has been made of it,29 Jung’s own connection, if any,30 to the völkisch movement is unclear. The only strong link is his friendship with the German indologist J. W. Hauer, who founded the German Faith Movement in 1932, a religious society aimed at replacing Christianity in German-speaking countries with an anti-Christian and anti-Semitic modern paganism based on German literature and Hindu scripture. Hauer, an ardent Nazi, hoped his movement would become the official religion of the Reich. Hitler, however, thought little of Hauer and laughed at his followers who “made asses of themselves by worshipping Wotan and Odin and the ancient, but now obsolete, German mythology,”31 a remark that says much about Hitler’s cynicism toward the völkisch ideology he nevertheless exploited to gain power.

Nothing is certain in this life; there is little sense in fear of the inevitable. We fight for the things that must change, and pray for matters beyond our control.

Ah, life… ’tis a difficult battle to fight,' said Willoughby, 'but the beautiful moments will always make up for the sorrow.