Folklore Love Quotes

A child who can love the oddities of a fantasy book cannot possibly be xenophobic as an adult. What is a different color, a different culture, a different tongue for a child who has already mastered Elvish, respected Puddleglums, or fallen under the spell of dark-skinned Ged?

I loved her, and a curse made me forget. But she came for me and broke the curse and now I must go.

it seems that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life!

And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are: Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth.

I despise my own past and that of others. I despise resignation, patience, professional heroism and all the obligatory sentiments. I also despise the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, radio announcers' voices, aerodynamics, the Boy Scouts, the smell of naphtha, the news, and drunks. I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street. I hope for vibrant love, the impossible, the chimerical. I dread knowing precisely my own limitations.

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.

It would be dreadfully ironic, I mused, if once I earned a soul, I forgot everything about being fey, including all my memories of her. That sort of ending seemed appropriately tragic; the smitten fey creature becomes human but forgets why he wanted to in the first place. Old fairy tales loved that sort of irony.

Together they’d run away. Together they could find a place to call home. Together they’d finally form their own constellation and never break apart again. He would be her starlight again and she his sun.

Why is it so difficult for us to think in relative terms? Well, for the good reason that human nature loves absoluteness, and erroneously considers it as a state of higher knowledge.

If we could love and hate with as good heart as the faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived like them. But until that day their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one-half of their fascination. Love with them never grows weary, nor can the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet.

Nothing I have will tempt you?” King Herla murmured. Lin could only shake her head. “Then perhaps I should offer myself,” Herla said as he sank to his knees before her. “Wonderful girl, will you have me as your husband?” “Oh, yes,” Lin said.

The mirror sighed and spoke in a tone tinged with melancholy. Its language was old and not of any of the worlds known or unknown. What you dream, what you darkly desire, Find it by trial or by fire. Seek it high and seek it low, Search the skies or the realms below. Look everywhere but beware, The deepest magic, the strongest spell Will not change what the stars foretell.

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

A lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress, said Abrenuncio. If we ever broke down the barriers, we could produce the centaur

We were strangers under the same roof. We were perfect pretenders in the stage of the world.

You know why I really hated you? With all that you had you were just so oblivious to it all. You didn't use your beauty. You didn't ever try to get what you wanted. You didn't deserve what you had. I did because I would have used it. And you just...loved me. Loved me no matter what I did. You have no idea how I despised you for that. I wanted you gone." 'The Yielding

Did Owen say your grandmother was a banshee?" "He said she was 'wailing like a banshee,'" I explained. Dan got out the dictionary , then; he was clucking his tongue and shaking his head, and laughing at himself saying, "That boy! What a boy! Brilliant but preposterous!" And that was the first time I learned, literally, what a banshee was--a banshee, in Irish folklore, is a female spirit whose wailing is a sign that a loved one will soon die.

Your Midas touch on the Chevy door November flush and your flannel cure "This dorm was once a madhouse" I made a joke, "Well, it's made for me" How evergreen, our group of friends Don't think we'll say that word again And soon they'll have the nerve to deck the halls That we once walked through One for the money, two for the show I never was ready, so I watch you go Sometimes you just don't know the answer 'Til someone's on their knees and asks you "She would've made such a lovely bride What a shame she's fucked in her head, " they said But you'll find the real thing instead She'll patch up your tapestry that I shred

She is a religion practiced by few, Fading fast to the plastic urban promises, So vintage, her beauty sounds fiction, Can’t separate the maiden from the myth, A fragrance meant for folklore, She is the love long forgotten by the roads…

She knew him as much as the knowing of her own heart’s secret: she was destined for the forest.

One wrong step and my life would change drastically.

There is no history in a place until we make it, until you live a life worth remembering. We have made a history here - some of it was more folklore than truth, more fear than anything else. But some of it was good. Some of it lives inside each of us, the history of this wild, wild, land.... I wonder if she will love this place as I do. If she will feel rooted here at birth. If she will look up at the stars and know, we're all just trying to find our way home.

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.

I've been very influenced by folklore, fairy tales, and folk ballads, so I love all the classic works based on these things -- like George Macdonald's 19th century fairy stories, the fairy poetry of W.B. Yeats, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's splendid book The Kingdoms of Elfin. (I think that particular book of hers wasn't published until the 1970s, not long before her death, but she was an English writer popular in the middle decades of the 20th century.) I'm also a big Pre-Raphaelite fan, so I love William Morris' early fantasy novels. Oh, and "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees (Neil Gaiman is a big fan of that one too), and I could go on and on but I won't!

In fantasy stories we learn to understand the differences of others, we learn compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist in the pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other people and places and engender an openness toward new experience. Fantasy puts the world into perspective in a way that 'realistic' literature rarely does. It is not so much an escape from the here-and-now as an expansion of each reader's horizons." "A child who can love the oddities of a fantasy book cannot possibly be xenophobic as an adult. What is a different color, a different culture, a different tongue for a child who has already mastered Elvish, respected Puddleglums, or fallen under the spell of dark-skinned Ged?

Because enchantment, by my definition, has nothing to do with fantasy, or escapism, or magical thinking: it is founded on a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world; a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life. The enchanted life presented here is one which is intuitive, embraces wonder and fully engages the creative imagination – but it is also deeply embodied, ecological, grounded in place and community. It flourishes on work that has heart and meaning; it respects the instinctive knowledge and playfulness of children. It understands the myths we live by; thrives on poetry, song and dance. It loves the folkloric, the handcrafted, the practice of traditional skills. It respects wild things, recognises the wisdom of the crow, seeks out the medicine of plants. It rummages and roots on the wild edges, but comes home to an enchanted home and garden. It is engaged with the small, the local, the ethical; enchanted living is slow living.

Researching Alaska, I loved the blurred line between history and Inuit folklore. This is an old land where the sun permanently sets for months on end, where dogs pull sleds across hundreds of miles of snow and ice, and where colorful sheets of light dance in the sky--the facts already feel magical.

Long ago, when faeries and men still wandered the earth as brothers, the MacLeod chief fell in love with a beautiful faery woman. They had no sooner married and borne a child when she was summoned to return to her people. Husband and wife said a tearful goodbye and parted ways at Fairy Bridge, which you can still visit today. Despite the grieving chief, a celebration was held to honor the birth of the newborn boy, the next great chief of the MacLeods. In all the excitement of the celebration, the baby boy was left in his cradle and the blanket slipped off. In the cold Highland night he began to cry. The baby’s cry tore at his mother, even in another dimension, and so she went to him, wrapping him in her shawl. When the nursemaid arrived, she found the young chief in the arms of his mother, and the faery woman gave her a song she insisted must be sung to the little boy each night. The song became known as “The Dunvegan Cradle Song,” and it has been sung to little chieflings ever since. The shawl, too, she left as a gift: if the clan were ever in dire need, all they would have to do was wave the flag she’d wrapped around her son, and the faery people would come to their aid. Use the gift wisely, she instructed. The magic of the flag will work three times and no more. As I stood there in Dunvegan Castle, gazing at the Fairy Flag beneath its layers of protective glass, it was hard to imagine the history behind it. The fabric was dated somewhere between the fourth and seventh centuries. The fibers had been analyzed and were believed to be from Syria or Rhodes. Some thought it was part of the robe of an early Christian saint. Others thought it was a part of the war banner for Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, who gave it to the clan as a gift. But there were still others who believed it had come from the shoulders of a beautiful faery maiden. And that faery blood had flowed through the MacLeod family veins ever since. Those people were the MacLeods themselves.

The Anne Rice books are a lot about infection. I read "Interview With the Vampire" a million times when I was in seventh and eighth grade. Also, [writing Gavriel's backstory] definitely came from those books: I sat down and reread them all and thought a lot about… the way in which vampirism is pushing away from humanity in interesting ways, and creating something new from humanity. I imprinted on those books pretty hard. Tanith Lee's "Sabella or the Blood Stone" was a big inspiration. I absolutely loved her books; when I was a kid, I wrote many bad Tanith Lee pastiches. Susie McKee Charnas' "The Vampire Tapestry." Poppy Z. Brite's "Lost Souls." Nancy Collins' "Sunglasses After Dark," which sounds like the most '80s title ever. It's about a vampire named Sonja Blue, and she goes around killing vampires. She's the only vampire who's half-alive. It's a really fun, blood-filled romp. It's very "Blade" before "Blade"--with a lady.

My view of writing "Coldest Girl in Coldtown" was to take every single thing that I loved from every vampire book I had ever read and dump it into one book--everything I like--trying to evoke some of the decadence… Vampires are a high-class monster: They want to dress up. They want to drink a lot of absinthe, or force their victims to drink a lot of absinthe. They have big parties and have elegant rituals. I think that's a thing we associate with vampires--they are the royalty of our monsters. We expect them to be rich, we expect them to be well-dressed. I wanted to have some of that be true because I like it, and have some of it not be true because it's kind of weird. I wanted to put in the idea of infection, which I was really interested in and which was a big feature of the vampire books I read growing up. And, the fear and desire for infection--the way in which our urge towards loving vampires is nihilistic. Our fear of them is our survival instincts kicking in.

I’ve read science fiction and fantasy all my life – though when you’re a child, they just call that “books.” The first book I ever read on my own was The Neverending Story. I studied classics at university, and in ancient literature, monsters, witches, magic, curses, and impossible machines aren’t genre, they’re just Tuesday afternoon. I had no idea that I was writing fantasy at first, because I was so saturated in Greek literature that it never occurred to me that my talking animals and sentient mazes were anything but realism. Our instinct toward folklore and magical stories, parables and imagining the future, are as much a part of the human experiences as divorce, grief, falling in love, politics, or raising children. I’ve always read fantastic literature, because it’s always seemed truest to me. It makes the metaphorical literal and is all the more powerful for that immediacy and directness. I love genre fiction for the infinite expanse of stories it can tell – and it’s been my constant companion since I was a very small child.

Some stories soak into the threads of the universe, beyond time, becoming echoes of memory lingering in the darkness, like dead stars, whispering light.

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

As many stars as there are in the sky, that is how many breaths I will love you for.

I love folklore and all festering superstitions.

I really love folklore. I had read a lot of faerie folklore that informed the books I wrote. I also really love vampire folklore; my eighth grade research paper was on [it]. [With this project,] it was really helpful to think about the way you can use language. When you're writing about faeries, you can't call anyone "fey"; there are certain words that become forbidden because they're actualized in what faeries do. When you write about vampires, you could think the same way about things like the word "red" or "hunger"--it's interesting to think of the ways that the words have double meanings, or different meanings that shifted.

The crowding of children into insufficient, often squalid spaces seems an inexplicable anomaly in the United States. Images of spaciousness and majesty, of endless plains and soaring mountains, fill our folklore and our music and the anthems that our children sing. “This land is your land,” they are told; and, in one of the patriotic songs that children truly love because it summons up so well the goodness and the optimism of the nation at its best, they sing of “good” and “brotherhood” “from sea to shining sea.” It is a betrayal of the best things that we value when poor children are obliged to sing these songs in storerooms and coat closets.

Our house was an old Tudor mansion. My father was very particular in keeping the smallest peculiarities of his home unaltered. Thus the many peaks and gables, the numerous turrets, and the mullioned windows with their quaint lozenge panes set in lead, remained very nearly as they had been three centuries back. Over and above the quaint melancholy of our dwelling, with the deep woods of its park and the sullen waters of the mere, our neighborhood was thinly peopled and primitive, and the people round us were ignorant, and tenacious of ancient ideas and traditions. Thus it was a superstitious atmosphere that we children were reared in, and we heard, from our infancy, countless tales of horror, some mere fables doubtless, others legends of dark deeds of the olden time, exaggerated by credulity and the love of the marvelous. ("Horror: A True Tale")

It is undefinable; and moreover, if it were defined it would lose all its value. God is not all that exists; God is all that does not exist. Therein resides the power & the charm of that mysterious word. God is tradition, God is legend, God is folklore, God is a fairy-tale, God is romance, God is a lie, God is a bell, God is a church window, God is religion, God is all that is absurd, useless, invisible, intangible, all that is nothingness & that symbolizes nothingness. God is the nihil in tenebris-(nothing in the darkness) -men have made of him light, life & love.

It must be admitted that the West has reached a level of scientific mastery and outstanding specialisation. In its points of reference, this evolution commands admiration and all civilisations have to benefit from the dynamic of this rationality, as they can derive lessons from the progress achieved. "Benefiting", "deriving lessons" do not, nevertheless, mean submission. In the same way, it must be acknowledged that other civilisations and cultures propose a rich vision of the world, and that some of these have managed to preserve the basic values of life, and glimpses of their fundamental shape are beginning to be seen in the West. It is not a question of suggesting a new wave of "love for exoticism and folklore". On the contrary, it is a question of engaging in an exigent reflection about cultural specificities and possible enrichment starting from within cultures and not at their peripherals.

Sahib, a bamboo doesn’t flower, but usually when it does it dies. So I am metaphorical to this plant. Last night, I flowered. In the morning I died. I am not being guilty or unhappy regarding the occurrence sahib. I am in ecstasy. I never bloomed in my life, I did once and that was my last. What died is the desire to be alive in spite of repetition of events like I used to, the strength to drink my sorrows and search happiness elsewhere not in you. We are bound by the rules of society, and I am a woman of morals. We both know things between us have changed and being around you would simply make no sense practically.

Mother-daughter relationships can be complicated and fraught with the effects of moments from the past. My mom knew this and wanted me to know it too. On one visit home, I found an essay from the Washington Post by the linguistics professor Deborah Tannen that had been cut out and left on my desk. My mom, and her mom before her, loved clipping newspaper articles and cartoons from the paper to send to Barbara and me. This article was different. Above it, my mom had written a note: “Dear Benny”—I was “Benny” from the time I was a toddler; the family folklore was that when we were babies, a man approached my parents, commenting on their cute baby boys, and my parents played along, pretending our names were Benjamin and Beauregard, later shorted to Benny and Bo. In her note, my mom confessed to doing many things that the writer of this piece had done: checking my hair, my appearance. As a teenager, I was continually annoyed by some of her requests: comb your hair; pull up your jeans (remember when low-rise jeans were a thing? It was not a good look, I can assure you!). “Your mother may assume it goes without saying that she is proud of you,” Deborah Tannen wrote. “Everyone knows that. And everyone probably also notices that your bangs are obscuring your vision—and their view of your eyes. Because others won’t say anything, your mother may feel it’s her obligation to tell you.” In leaving her note and the clipping, my mom was reminding me that she accepted and loved me—and that there is no perfect way to be a mother. While we might have questioned some of the things our mother said, we never questioned her love.

My Violet, By the time you find this, you’ll most likely be in the Scribe Quadrant. Remember that folklore is passed from one generation to the next to teach us about our past. If we lose it, we lose the links to our past. It only takes one desperate generation to change history—even erase it. I know you’ll make the right choice when the time comes. You have always been the best of both your mother and me. Love, Dad

This has been my difficulty. The difficulty with my life. Those well-built trig points, those physical determinants of parents, background, school, family, birth, marriage, death, love, work, are themselves as much in motion as I am. What should be stable, shifts. What I am told is solid, slips. The sensible strong ordinary world of fixity is folklore. The earth is not flat. Geometry cedes to algebra. The Greeks were wrong.

Polly's no company for him, really, you can see that, and in many ways she seems dreadfully on his nerves. She's so insular, you know, nothing is right for her, she hates the place, hates the people, even hates the climate. Boy at least is very cosmopolitan, speaks beautiful Italian, prepared to be interested in the local folk-lore and things like that, but you can't be interested quite alone and Polly is so discouraging. Everything seems rot to her and she only longs for England.

Back at the cottage we explored the topography of my body; twigs in my hair, calves striped red and my skirt smudged in meadowtones. The forest underlined me, accentuated me, illustrated me. I felt alive in that midnight village whose dark places left their signatures on my skin, whose bites still hummed around my wrists. I didn’t notice till then the thousand nettle stings rising like pearls; burning bracelets that my love kissed and rubbed with dock leaves; a folk remedy painting my pulse points green; honorary stalks.

In the life of Moses, in Hebrew folklore, there is a remarkable passage. Moses finds a shepherd in the desert. He spends the day with the shepherd and helps him milk his ewes, and at the end of the day he sees that the shepherd puts the best milk he has in a wooden bowl, which he places on a flat stone some distance away. So Moses asks him what it is for, and the shepherd replies 'This is God's milk.' Moses is puzzled and asks him what he means. The shepherd says 'I always take the best milk I possess, and I bring it as on offering to God.' Moses, who is far more sophisticated than the shepherd with his naive faith, asks, 'And does God drink it?' 'Yes,' replies the shepherd, 'He does.' Then Moses feels compelled to enlighten the poor shepherd and he explains that God, being pure spirit, does not drink milk. Yet the shepherd is sure that He does, and so they have a short argument, which ends with Moses telling the shepherd to hide behind the bushes to find out whether in fact God does come to drink the milk. Moses then goes out to pray in the desert. The shepherd hides, the night comes, and in the moonlight the shepherd sees a little fox that comes trotting from the desert, looks right, looks left and heads straight towards the milk, which he laps up, and disappears into the desert again. The next morning Moses finds the shepherd quite depressed and downcast. 'What's the matter?' he asks. The shepherd says 'You were right, God is pure spirit, and He doesn't want my milk.' Moses is surprised. He says 'You should be happy. You know more about God than you did before.' 'Yes, I do' says the shepherd, 'but the only thing I could do to express my love for Him has been taken away from me.' Moses sees the point. He retires into the desert and prays hard. In the night in a vision, God speaks to him and says 'Moses, you were wrong. It is true that I am pure spirit. Nevertheless I always accepted with gratitude the milk which the shepherd offered me, as the expression of his love, but since, being pure spirit, I do not need the milk, I shared it with this little fox, who is very fond of milk.

Seasons passed by. I always loved to watch the trees in our garden. With the first rain, the leaves would drench themselves. Slowly they would grow tired of the rain and droop. So would I, grow tired of waiting for him to look at me, talk to me. Slowly the leaves would dry up, and fall to the ground. It resembled a naked and shameless woman, trying to woo her husband. And the season would change, and the leaves would shoot slowly trying to gain the lost vigor. It would start blooming and look in its best form. The tree would be so overwhelmed by its own beauty that it would call upon the butterfly and birds. It would make everyone happy. But has anyone wondered how it feels? It feels like me.

William Slothrop was a peculiar bird. He took off from Boston, heading west in true Imperial style, in 1634 or -5, sick and tired of the Winthrop machine, convinced he could preach as well as anybody in the hierarchy even if he hadn’t been officially ordained. The ramparts of the Berkshires stopped everybody else at the time, but not William. He just started climbing. He was one of the very first Europeans in. After they settled in Berkshire, he and his son John got a pig operation going—used to drive hogs right back down the great escarpment, back over the long pike to Boston, drive them just like sheep or cows. By the time they got to market those hogs were so skinny it was hardly worth it, but William wasn’t really in it so much for the money as just for the trip itself. He enjoyed the road, the mobility, the chance encounters of the day—Indians, trappers, wenches, hill people—and most of all just being with those pigs. They were good company. Despite the folklore and the injunctions in his own Bible, William came to love their nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day—pigs out on the road, in company together, were everything Boston wasn’t, and you can imagine what the end of the journey, the weighing, slaughter and dreary pigless return back up into the hills must’ve been like for William. Of course he took it as a parable—knew that the squealing bloody horror at the end of the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untroubled pink eyelashes and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in crosscountry movement. It was a little early for Isaac Newton, but feelings about action and reaction were in the air. William must’ve been waiting for the one pig that wouldn’t die, that would validate all the ones who’d had to, all his Gadarene swine who’d rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying . . . possessed by innocence they couldn’t lose . . . by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life. . . .

See around, you shall find how relations oscillate between love and hate; it is the misery we our self create. What love really is we hardly know in spite of the big descriptions we all so eagerly throw. Some seek it to run away from a dark past, they think salvation through it shall forever last. They forget, it is their psychological need which they mistook to be love otherwise it is a simple greed. We brought it down from profundity to mere clinging and addiction, it then no longer serves as a benediction. The ancient texts declared it to be the elixir of life but the modern human reduced it to be a mere reason for strife. Who truly loved have become scattered fragments of folklore, the beautiful suffering of it was such they always wanted more. They never looked for it in outer shapes and forms and perhaps created it all from their inner storms.

But I was thinking of Polly. If Boy was bored and lonely she was not likely to be very happy either. The success or failure of all human relationships lies in the atmosphere each person is aware of creating for the other, what atmosphere could a disillusioned Polly feel that she was creating for a bored and lonely Boy? Her charm, apart from her beauty, and husbands, we know, get accustomed to the beauty of their wives so that it ceases to strike them at the heart, her charm used to derive from the sphinx-like quality which came from her secret dream of Boy; in the early days of that dream coming true, at Alconleigh, happiness had made her irresistible. But I quite saw that with the riddle solved, and if the happiness were dissolved, Polly, without her own little daily round of Madame Rita, Debenhams and the hairdresser to occupy her, and too low in vitality to invent new interests for herself, might easily sink into sulky dumps. She was not at all likely to find consolation in Sicilian folk-lore, I knew, and probably not, not yet, anyhow, in Sicilian noblemen. 'Oh, dear,' I said. 'If Boy isn't happy I don't suppose Polly can be either. Oh, poor Polly.

But after he had been singing awhile, mist and shadows seemed to gather about him, sometimes coming out of the sea, and sometimes moving upon it. It seemed to him that one of the shadows was the queen-woman he had seen in her sleep at Slieve Echtge; not in her sleep now, but mocking, and calling out to them that were behind her: 'He was weak, he was weak, he had no courage.' And he felt the strands of the rope in his hand yet, and went on twisting it, but it seemed to him as he twisted, that it had all the sorrows of the world in it. And then it seemed to him as if the rope had changed in his dream into a great water-worm that came out of the sea, and that twisted itself about him, and held him closer and closer, and grew from big to bigger till the whole of the earth and skies were wound up in it, and the stars themselves were but the shining of the ridges of its skin. And then he got free of it, and went on, shaking and unsteady, along the edge of the strand, and the grey shapes were flying here and there around him. And this is what they were saying, 'It is a pity for him that refuses the call of the daughters of the Sidhe, for he will find no comfort in the love of the women of the earth to the end of life and time, and the cold of the grave is in his heart for ever. It is death he has chosen; let him die, let him die, let him die.

With the motto “do what you will,” Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau’s Alector, Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda’s Justina, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville’s Fantastic Tales, Sorel’s Francion, Burton’s Anatomy, Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Amory’s John Buncle, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett’s Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr, Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey’s Doctor, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe’s ornate novels, Bely’s Petersburg, Joyce’s Ulysses, Witkiewicz’s Polish jokes, Flann O’Brien’s Irish farces, Philip Wylie’s Finnley Wren, Patchen’s tender novels, Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s mad ones, Nabokov’s later works, Schmidt’s fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard’s later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palinuro of Mexico), the fabulous creations of those gay Cubans Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas, Markson’s Springer’s Progress, Mano’s Take Five, Ríos’s Larva and otros libros, the novels of Paul West, Tom Robbins, Stanley Elkin, Alexander Theroux, W. M. Spackman, Alasdair Gray, Gaétan Soucy, and Rikki Ducornet (“Lady Rabelais,” as one critic called her), Mark Leyner’s hyperbolic novels, the writings of Magiser Gass, Greer Gilman’s folkloric fictions and Roger Boylan’s Celtic comedies, Vollmann’s voluminous volumes, Wallace’s brainy fictions, Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language, Danielewski’s novels, Jackson’s Half Life, Field’s Ululu, De La Pava’s Naked Singularity, and James McCourt’s ongoing Mawrdew Czgowchwz saga. (p. 331)

Long ago there was a little boy who lived in the wood with his father and his sister. One night, the three of them were out collecting firewood when they heard a low, delicate whimper. The father realised it was an injured animal and ordered the children to fetch water from the lake, whilst he followed the sound. Hours past but the father did not return. The children became fearful for their father’s safety and in their moment of fright, they disobeyed their father in order to find him. And find him they did. However, he was no longer the man he once was. Both his eyes were slit through their centre, oozing blood down the paleness of his face. His neck had been torn open. The entirety of his midsection was split but nothing, not one, single organ, seemed to be left within. Each limb still remained, however they had been dragged, with some exceptional force, in the opposite direction to which they were designed. The children screamed and ran, though the image of their father’s mangled corpse seemed to chase after them. They slept. Within the whisper of the wind came the sweet tune of a woman’s song. The little girl awoke to the feeling of happiness, security and motherly love that the song carried with it. She needed to find the woman it had come from. Leaving her brother, she took off into the wood to try and find the singer. The little boy quickly entered into a spit of panic when he found his sister missing. He didn’t know whether he should call out for her, look for her or wait. But waiting could mean the worst, he thought, and so he took off into the woods after her. He had searched everywhere, every dark corner and decrepit tree, before reaching the lake. The moon reflected off its black surface, which drew his attention to something bobbing within the ripples. It was a leg. When he caught sight of the foot, the boy fell to his knees. He recognised the shoe. It was his sister’s shoe; his sister’s leg. Soon enough, the other body parts came drifting to join the leg, forming a rough manifestation of what was once his sister’s living body. Firstly, there was a head facing down in the water, then arms seemingly blue under the moonlight, and lastly a torso coated in her favourite dress. He felt sick, lost, terrified to his very core. Just as thoughts of never being whole again began to pain his chest, the boy heard the snapping of a twig behind him. He dared to turn around but all he found was a small, black-furred wolf. The wolf approached him timidly, whining deep in its throat to say to the boy that he too was lonely and afraid. The boy put out his hand for the wolf to join him and they sat together. Perhaps he would be OK. Perhaps all that had happened had led to this; something new. He rustled the fur of his new friend, starting with its back then its ear before going under its snout. His hand touched something wet and sticky. He drew it from the wolf to get a better look, only to find a crimson substance now clinging to his small hands. Blood. The wolf turned on the boy as its eyes became a pale blue before thwack! He tore the boy’s face from his head…

I don't fully know what love is. I don't think anybody I ever met does. People do have theories about it. It’s amazing how humans love to fabricate theories and opinions on topics they know nothing about. Many times it seems that people are more obsessed towards expressing themselves on the things they don’t know, rather than honestly sharing what they know. It’s impressive how arrogance often hides selfishness in the backstage; as if arrogance was the forefront of a desperate need to unselfish oneself. In this sense, if I look back at my books, all the books I ever wrote on relationships and love, I would clearly realize that they need to be rewritten. They are not necessarily wrong in their core, but they may not be very helpful too, in a highly complex and “brain-obsessed" society as it is this on planet earth. Solutions on a mentally enslaved planet are like the sun seen behind bars to those in a prison cell. Within this perspective, we can see that humans are both consciously and unconsciously correct, in both their humane and inhumane actions and words, and being fully honest too, when rejecting it. For they need the key to their freedom more than they the sun. To these souls, the heart is further apart than the sun or the key to their freedom. They can only talk about it, as if it was a myth, just like prehistoric tribes, when addressing their folklore.

Whiskers: According to an old bit of folklore, cat’s whiskers that you find somewhere can be used in a wish-fulfilling spell. For this to work, burn the whisker and whisper a wish to the smoke. This spell might be accomplished with the whiskers of other animals too, like using a dog’s whiskers to inspire devotion and constancy.

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

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.

Chaos came Eros (Sexual love) and Gaia (Earth). Both are personifications of the driving force behind the acts of procreation through which the Cosmos became populated. In time, Gaia would surround and engulf Chaos itself.

Adaptogens: Herbs for Strength, Stamina, and Stress Relief by David Winston and Steven Maimes An in-depth discussion of adaptogens with detailed monographs for many adaptogenic, nervine, and nootropic herbs. Adaptogens in Medical Herbalism: Elite Herbs and Natural Compounds for Mastering Stress, Aging, and Chronic Disease by Donald R. Yance A scientifically based herbal and nutritional program to master stress, improve energy, prevent degenerative disease, and age gracefully. Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients into Foods and Remedies That Heal by Rosalee de la Forêt This book offers an introduction to herbal energetics for the beginner, plus a host of delicious and simple recipes for incorporating medicinal plants into meals. Rosalee shares short chapters on a range of herbs, highlighting scientific research on each plant. The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry by Ann Armbrecht Forbes In a world awash with herbal books, this is a much-needed reference, central to the future of plant medicine itself. Ann weaves a complex tapestry through the story threads of the herbal industry: growers, gatherers, importers, herbalists, and change-making business owners and non-profits. As interest in botanical medicine surges and the world’s population grows, medicinal plant sustainability is paramount. A must-read for any herbalist. The Complete Herbal Tutor: The Ideal Companion for Study and Practice by Anne McIntyre Provides extensive herbal profiles and materia medica; offers remedy suggestions by condition and organ system. This is a great reference guide for the beginner to intermediate student. Foundational Herbcraft by jim mcdonald jim mcdonald has a gift for explaining energetics in a down-to-earth and engaging way, and this 200-page PDF is a compilation of his writings on the topic. jim’s categorization of herbal actions into several groups (foundational actions, primary actions, and secondary actions) adds clarity and depth to the discussion. Access the printable PDF and learn more about jim’s work here. The Gift of Healing Herbs: Plant Medicines and Home Remedies for a Vibrantly Healthy Life by Robin Rose Bennett A beautiful tour of some of our most healing herbs, written in lovely prose. Full of anecdotes, recipes, and simple rituals for connecting with plants. Herbal Healing for Women: Simple Home Remedies for All Ages by Rosemary Gladstar Thorough and engaging materia medica. This was the only book Juliet brought with her on a three-month trip to Central America and she never tired of its pages. Information is very accessible with a lot of recipes and formulas. Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health: 175 Teas, Tonics, Oils, Salves, Tinctures, and Other Natural Remedies for the Entire Family by Rosemary Gladstar Great beginner reference and recipe treasury written by the herbal fairy godmother herself. The Modern Herbal by Maude Grieve This classic text was first published in 1931 and contains medicinal, culinary, cosmetic, and economic properties, plus cultivation and folklore of herbs. Available for free online.

She used to come for the Folklore Fridays. It was a pet project of Dad’s. People would come to the café and talk about Norfolk myths and legends, read short stories and poems. Sometimes there’d be a singer. Dad loved all that stuff. Black Shuck, the Lantern Men, the Fairy Cow, the Southwood Pond.

Her mother, who, since the death of the King, her father, had nothing in the world she cared for so much as this little Princess, was so terribly afraid of losing her that she quite spoiled her, and never tried to correct any of her faults. The consequence was that this little person, who was as pretty as possible, and was one day to wear a crown, grew up so proud and so much in love with her own beauty that she despised everyone else in the world.

By bringing together our differences we will see how similar we really are. Combining our strengths and talents is how we will survive, and embracing love according to the needs and values of the tribe is how we shall conquer our fear...

She looks to the sky watching the rain as it falls through space and there is nothing to see in the ruined yard but the world insisting on itself, the cement’s sedate crumbling giving way to the rising sap beneath, and when the yard is past there will remain the world’s insistence, the world insisting it is not a dream and yet to the looker there is no escaping the dream and the price of life that is suffering, and she sees her children delivered into a world of devotion and love and sees them damned to a world of terror, wishing for such a world to end, wishing for the world its destruction, and she looks at her infant son, this child who remains an innocent and she sees how she has fallen afoul of herself and grows aghast, seeing that out of terror comes pity and out of pity comes love and out of love the world can be redeemed again, and she can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight, and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore, Ben’s laughter behind her and she turns and sees Molly tickling him on her lap and she watches her son and sees in his eyes a radiant intensity that speaks of the world before the fall, and she is on her knees crying, taking hold of Molly’s hand.

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Ficino also conceived of eros, or love, as the spiritual force that drove the universe (Orion, 1995:86–87). Again, this presages Neo-Pagan and especially Wiccan notions of the polarity between goddess and god, feminine and masculine energies in the universe,

Twelve years ago I left Boston and New York, and moved east and west at the same time. East, to a little village in Devon, England, a town I’ve been familiar with for years, since my friends Brian and Wendy Froud and Alan Lee all live there. It had long been my dream to live in England, so I finally bought a little old cottage over there. But I decided, both for visa and health reasons, living there half the year would be better than trying to cope with cold, wet Dartmoor winters. At that point, Beth Meacham had moved out to Arizona, and I discovered how wonderful the Southwest is, particularly in the wintertime. Now I spend every winter-spring in Tucson and every summer-autumn in England. Both places strongly affect my writing and my painting. They’re very opposite landscapes, and each has a very different mythic history. In Tucson, the population is a mix of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Euro-Americans of various immigrant backgrounds — so the folklore of the place is a mix of all those things, as well as the music and the architecture. The desert has its own colors, light, and rhythms. In Devon, by contrast, it’s all Celtic and green and leafy, and the color palette of the place comes straight out of old English paintings — which is more familiar to me, growing up loving the Pre-Raphaelites and England’s ‘Golden Age’ illustrators. I’ve learned to love an entirely different palette in Arizona, where the starkness of the desert is offset by the brilliance of the light, the cactus in bloom, and the wild colors of Mexican decor.

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.

That is why in the case of some of our Mohammedan or Christian countrymen who had originally been forcibly converted to a non-Hindu religion and who consequently have inherited along with Hindus, a common Fatherland and a greater part of the wealth of a common culture—language, law, customs, folklore and history—are not and cannot be recognized as Hindus. For though Hindusthan to them is Fatherland as to any other Hindu yet it is not to them a Holyland too. Their holyland is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and Godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently their names and their outlook smack of a foreign origin. Their love is divided. Nay, if some of them be really believing what they profess to do, then there can be no choice—they must, to a man, set their Holy-land above their Fatherland in their love and allegiance. That is but natural. We are not condemning nor are we lamenting. We are simply telling facts as they stand. We have tried to determine the essentials of Hindutva and in doing so we have discovered that the Bohras and such other Mohammedan or Christian communities possess all the essential qualifications of Hindutva but one and that is that they do not look upon India as their Holyland.

I've spent my life wondering when I would earn the right to be a man again. Despite the undeserved good fortune of finding my true love, I always held a kernel of bitterness in my heart that things were not different... I will never be the man that I was. That man is dead—slain—for better or for worse, by my life as the Beast. In your words, the world does not need who I was.

And that's all, my young friends. The legend spread on the winds of Mexico City and the winds of '68, fusing with the stories of the dead and the survivors and now everybody knows that a woman stayed at the university when its freedom was violated in that beautiful, tragic year. And I've heard others tell the story many times, and in their telling, the woman who spent fifteen days shut in a bathroom without eating is a medical student or a secretary at the Torre de Rectoría, not a Uruguayan with no papers or work or place to lay her head. And sometimes it isn't even a woman but a man, a Maoist student or a professor with gastrointestinal troubles. And when I hear these stories, these versions of my story, I don't usually say anything (especially if I'm not drunk). And if I am drunk, I try to play it down. That's nothing, I say, that's university folk-lore, that's urban legend, and then they look at me and say: Auxilio, you're the mother of Mexican poetry. And I say (or if I'm drunk, I shout): no, I'm not anybody's mother, but I do know them all, all the young poets of Mexico City, those who were born here and those who came from the provinces, and those who were swept here on the current from other places in Latin America, and I love them all.

Folklore tells of sea maidens who tamed the raging ocean to allow their sailors safe passage. But for those sailors they had loved and then lost at sea, never to be seen again, they eternally wept. When their tears hit the seawater, they turned to glass. And to this day, their tears washed ashore as gleaming, colorful treasures. Remnants of true love.

If there is any one person you can't love, then you don't understand love. The bitter cup we have to drink is the dregs of humility; we must see past the outer shells of insecurity to the seed of divinity deep inside each one of us. No one virtue is strong enough to stand on its own. No one vice is simple enough not to lead to all others. No one person can appreciate and support us as much as we need. No one event is enough to tear apart our lives. What does this all mean? We have to give everything or we will have nothing. We cannot take any short cuts. We have to love everyone, or we cannot truly love anyone. No excuse will mean anything to us in the end. People are beautiful, don’t forget that. Don’t let pomp and circumstance, society or folklore fool you with counterfeit beauty. True beauty is usually not something you can see, but something you feel; something that inspires you.

Folklore settled onto her shoulders, heavy and imperfect and lovely.

and she sees how she has fallen afoul of herself and grows aghast, seeing that out of terror comes pity and out of pity comes love and out of love the world can be redeemed again, and she can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight, and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore,

It is well to learn the ethnic backgrounds of your parents, to love and cherish the ancient folklore. But never, never forget, you are an American first. And millions of Americans before you have fought for your freedom. The Nation holds all the terms of our endearment. Support, defend and honor those whose duty it is to keep it safe.

Horseman is the haunting sequel to the 1820 novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving and takes place two decades after the events that unfolded in the original. We are introduced to 14-year-old trans boy Bente “Ben” Van Brunt, who has been raised by his idiosyncratic grandparents - lively Brom “Bones” Van Brunt and prim Kristina Van Tassel - in the small town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, where gossip and rumour run rife and people are exceedingly closed-minded. He has lived with them on their farm ever since he was orphaned when his parents, Bendix and Fenna, died in suspicious and enigmatic circumstances. Ben and his only friend, Sander, head into the woodland one Autumn day to play a game known as Sleepy Hollow Boys, but they are both a little startled when they witness a group of men they recognise from the village discussing the headless, handless body of a local boy that has just been found. But this isn't the end; it is only the beginning. From that moment on, Ben feels an otherworldly presence following him wherever he ventures, and one day while scanning his grandfather’s fields he catches a fleeting glimpse of a weird creature seemingly sucking blood from a victim. An evil of an altogether different nature. But Ben knows this is not the elusive Horseman who has been the primary focus of folkloric tales in the area for many years because he can both feel and hear his presence. However, unlike others who fear the Headless Horseman, Ben can hear whispers in the woods at the end of a forbidden path, and he has visions of the Horseman who says he is there to protect him. Ben soon discovers connections between the recent murders and the death of his parents and realises he has been shaded from the truth about them his whole life. Thus begins a journey to unravel the mystery and establish his identity in the process. This is an enthralling and compulsively readable piece of horror fiction building on Irvings’ solid ground. Evoking such feelings as horror, terror, dread and claustrophobic oppressiveness, this tale invites you to immerse yourself in its sinister, creepy and disturbing narrative. The staggering beauty of the remote village location is juxtaposed with the darkness of the demons and devilish spirits that lurk there, and the village residents aren't exactly welcoming to outsiders or accepting of anyone different from their norm. What I love the most is that it is subtle and full of nuance, instead of the usual cheap thrills with which the genre is often pervaded, meaning the feeling of sheer panic creeps up on you when you least expect, and you come to the sudden realisation that the story has managed to get under your skin, into your psyche and even into your dreams (or should that be nightmares?) Published at a time when the nights are closing in and the light diminishes ever more rapidly, not to mention with Halloween around the corner, this is the perfect autumnal read for the spooky season full of both supernatural and real-world horrors. It begins innocuously enough to lull you into a false sense of security but soon becomes bleak and hauntingly atmospheric as well as frightening before descending into true nightmare-inducing territory. A chilling and eerie romp, and a story full of superstition, secrets, folklore and old wives’ tales and with messages about love, loss, belonging, family, grief, being unapologetically you and becoming more accepting and tolerant of those who are different. Highly recommended.

In Russian folklore, a crawl space is a small area beneath the floor where evil spirits live. I believe that within each person exists a crawl space where inner demons dwell, persistently tormenting until the soul is overwhelmed by the anguish and shatters into fragments

But what would you do if I, I Break free and leave us in ruins Took this dagger in me and removed it Gain the weight of you then lose it Believe me, I could do it If it's all in my head tell me now Tell me I've got it wrong somehow I know my love should be celebrated But you ★ tolerate it ★" - tolerate it (Taylor Swift)

It would have been a lovely evening had it not been for the unfortunate circumstance of my death

I wonder for the first time, with a sharply caught breath, if I did love Peeta then. If the grief that poured out of me during his Games had been the outcry of a breaking heart, rendered powerless to prevent her beloved's pain. If I agreed to his bargain not simply to save my family but because my heart desperately wanted to live in the glow of his. If the kiss I clumsily pressed to his cheek after the Reaping – the kiss that sent me sprinting back to the woods to burrow among the roots of an old tree and cry myself sick – had nothing to do with debt or gratitude and everything to do with love and loss. I wonder if I've loved him since that moment under the apple tree when a boy with a bruised cheek threw burnt bread and life to a dying girl. A girl who grew and thrived because of that boy and that bread, who wished for five years that she could have soothed his cruel bruise with a kiss. Was that why I kissed him after the Reaping? Had I been carrying that clumsy kiss inside of me all that while? Had Peeta brought life to my heart as well as my body that hopeless day in the rain? Have I ever not loved him? I shake away these troubling thoughts with a shiver that reaches to my bones. My love for Peeta is fresh and fragile as a hatchling, I'm sure of it; kindled by his compassion and coaxed into its present brave blaze by the tenderness he shows me at every moment. It's foolish and futile to wonder whether I might have loved him before coming here, let alone when that love might first have flickered into existence. I am a wild creature, devoted to the boy who tamed me with warmth and food and gentle touches, and I accordingly express that love with woodland gifts. Like a courting bird in an old tale, bringing her sweetheart all manner of odd little presents to feather his nest.

in the greater part of the humble homes we visit we become aware of the existence of many domestic virtues, we see numerous tokens of family affection, of filial reverence, of parental love. And when, as we pass along the village street at night, we see gleaming through the utter darkness the faint rays which tell that even in many a poverty-stricken home a lamp is burning before the “holy pictures,” we feel that these poor tillers of the soil, ignorant and uncouth though they too often are, may be raised at times by lofty thoughts and noble aspirations far above the low level of the dull and hard lives which they are forced to lead.

continuous quiver of love runs through Italian folklore. In speaking of the Sicilian tales, I mentioned the popularity of the Cupid and Psyche type found not only in Sicily but also in Tuscany and more or less everywhere.

She is always ready to bring to life feminine characters who are active, enterprising, and courageous, in contrast to the traditional concept of the Sicilian woman as a passive and withdrawn creature. (This strikes me as a personal, conscious choice.) She passes completely over what I should say was the dominant element in the majority of Sicilian tales: amorous longing, a predilection for the theme of love as exemplified in the lost husband or wife motif, so widespread in Mediterranean folklore and dating back to the oldest written example, the Hellenistic tale of Amor and Psyche told in Apuleius’ Metamorphosis (second century A.D.) and repeated through the ages in hundreds and hundreds of stories about encounters and separations, mysterious bridegrooms from the nether regions, invisible brides, and horse- or serpent-kings who turn into handsome young men at night.

We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folk-lore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs?

The crowding of children into insufficient, often squalid spaces seems an inexplicable anomaly in the United States. Images of spaciousness and majesty, of endless plains and soaring mountains, fill our folklore and our music and the anthems that our children sing. "This land is your land," they are told; and, in one of the patriotic songs that children truly love because it summons up so well the goodness and the optimism of the nation at its best, they sing of "good" and "brotherhood" "from sea to shining sea." It is a betrayal of the best things that we value when poor children are obliged to sing these songs in storerooms and coat closets.

Years ago, Once Upon a Time was Right Now. And eventually, Right Now will become Once Upon a Time. In fact, it just did. Time is funny like that. In most stories time is very important. Not in this one. The story may have horses and not cars, but really it could happen now like it did then. Then being Once Upon a Time, years and years ago. The story is one of passion, and last time I checked, passion was still around. It exists in love, hate, obsession. For instance, I have a passion for pickled herring. I can’t live without it. Every day I have to have some. In my salad, raw, on my sandwiches. It tastes great on hamburgers. However, this story is not about pickled herring, but it does have love, hate, and obsession. I tell you about these things first because it is these things that cause everything else, as we know they are prone to do. And there’s a lot of other things in this story, too: There are monsters and mobbers, heroes and heroines, villains and thieves, power and conquest, murder and mayhem (sounds like politics, doesn’t it?), beasts and battles, and last but not least, pride and honor. Oh, and don’t forget arugula! Arugula is very good, though not as good as pickled herring. Even arugula has a place in the story. And what a magnificent story it is! I give myself great credit for coming-up with it. OK. Slight lie. I didn’t (technically) come-up with it. It was actually told to me over and over again by my grandfather. He didn’t come-up with it either, though. I think he got it from his grandfather. And I’m not exactly sure where his grandfather got it from. Probably from some old folklore or something. But as far as I know, it’s a true story. Anyway, if credit is to be given, I guess you can give it to my grandfather, cause he always told it so well. I’ve done some of what ya might call “editing,” but basically I tried to tell it just like he did (he died some years back). I only hope I can give you what he gave me, even though he didn’t give me this story because this entire paragraph was a complete and utter lie. Either way, I think you’ll enjoy what comes...

He was a knight of the range, a western hero who quickly became part of popular American folklore. His beliefs and personal habits were sketched as a guideline to those who wrote his adventures. “The Lone Ranger believes that our sacred American heritage provides every individual the right to worship God as he desires. The Lone Ranger never makes love on radio, television, in movies, or in cartoons. He is a man who can fight great odds, yet take the time to treat a bird with a broken wing. The Lone Ranger never smokes, never uses profanity, and never uses intoxicating beverages. The Lone Ranger at all times uses precise speech, without slang or dialect. His grammar must be pure: he must make proper use of ‘who’ and ‘whom,’ ‘shall’ and ‘will,’ ‘I’ and me.’ The Lone Ranger never shoots to kill: when he has to use his guns, he aims to maim as painlessly as possible. Play down gambling and drinking scenes as far as possible, and keep the Lone Ranger out of saloons. When this cannot be avoided, try to make the saloon a cafe, and deal with waiters and food rather than bartenders and liquor.

The Titanomachy symbolizes the victory of Order over Chaos.” - Niall Livingstone[3] “the Greek word Mythos can indicate, amongst other things, a public utterance expressing the authority of its speaker.”[4] In fact, by the Classical Period, myths were principally instructive, hence Plato’s dim view of these stories being in the hands of anyone but philosophers. Myths helped crystallize beliefs and fashion a means of observing and categorizing patterns in daily life. According to Hesiod, the "Pre-World" was populated by personifications;[5] he painted the picture of the primordial geography of his worldview by dramatizing the personification of those elements he considered primal. This is a perfectly arbitrary folkloric trope, but in the case of the ancient Greeks, the antagonism was infused with strains of uncomfortable duality. Hesiod’s intention was to glorify Zeus, but in doing so, he created a melodrama that would last the ages.

“All my life,” she said, “I have been told ‘go’ and ‘come.’ I am told how I will live, and I am told how I must die. I must be a man’s servant and a mare for his pleasure, or I must hide myself behind walls and surrender my flesh to a cold, silent god. I would walk into the jaws of hell itself, if it were a path of my own choosing. I would rather die tomorrow in the forest than live a hundred years of the life appointed me.” — 4.85 ★ Whimsical, enchanting, magical. I don’t know how else to describe this masterpiece, I absolutely loved every page of this book with my whole heart. The beautiful writing and delightful atmosphere made me fall in love with the story, full of Russian folklore. I mean, I’m a sucker for myths and fairy tales, but god, this book made an amazing work retelling them. Really recommend it. I will definitely be picking the sequel next month, when cold finally settles in and I can read it with my blanket and my hot cup of coffee on a windy evening. “In Russian, Frost was called Morozko, the demon of winter. But long ago, the people called him Karachun, the death-god. Under that name, he was king of black midwinter who came for bad children and froze them in the night.”

It’s just that I want her to open up to my version of fairy tales, my melancholy stories from Japanese folklore. Where the endings are often bittersweet—emphasis on the “bitter.” Where it’s possible for, say, a girl with a dead mom and a deadbeat dad to triumph somehow, even if it means casting aside idealized notions of love and turning into a monster.

Kaya naming mamuhay nang walang mga diyos, Maklium-sa-Tiwan," bulong ko sa kanya. "Maiksi man ang buhay ng tao, `yan ang lakas namin na wala sa mga diwatang tulad ninyo.

Mas gugustuhin ko ang mundong ligtas," sabi niya, "na walang mga nilalang na tulad nating pwedeng maglagay sa buhay ng iba sa panganib.

What to read next? Hm…well, if you want more Carrie Jo, check out the Idlewood books. She’s at a new house, and there are heartbreaking child ghosts that need her help, but be warned, you’ll love them too. Most of them, anyway. I have also completed a historical fiction series about Queen Nefertiti. It’s called the Desert Queen series, and I’m very happy with it. If you fancy a bit of adventure in ancient Egypt, check it out. The first book in that series, The Tale of Nefret, is on Kindle. I also have a spooky plantation series called Sugar Hill. There are five books in that one: The Wife of the Left Hand, The Ramparts, and Blood by Candlelight, The Starlight Ball, and His Lovely Garden. I can’t wait to introduce you to the Dufresne family and take you through their plantation, Sugar Hill. Like Seven Sisters, the series will be chock-full of Southern folklore and historical places. Sugar Hill is like Gone With the Wind, but with ghosts! Thanks again for staying with me through this series. I appreciate all your kind words, the reviews, and the emails. Don’t forget to sign up for my mailing list or follow me on Amazon or BookBub so you can get the newest release information right in your inbox. I’ve got a website too that I visit infrequently. Check it out. See y’all soon. M.L. Bullock Christmas at Seven Sisters Three Short Stories from the Seven Sisters Series By M.L.