Folklore Short Quotes

I learned there were lots of realities in the world.

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.

Having to amuse myself during those earlier years, I read voraciously and widely. Mythic matter and folklore made up much of that reading—retellings of the old stories (Mallory, White, Briggs), anecdotal collections and historical investigations of the stories' backgrounds—and then I stumbled upon the Tolkien books which took me back to Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Branch Cabell, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake and the like. I was in heaven when Lin Carter began the Unicorn imprint for Ballantine and scoured the other publishers for similar good finds, delighting when I discovered someone like Thomas Burnett Swann, who still remains a favourite. This was before there was such a thing as a fantasy genre, when you'd be lucky to have one fantasy book published in a month, little say the hundreds per year we have now. I also found myself reading Robert E. Howard (the Cormac and Bran mac Morn books were my favourites), Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and finally started reading science fiction after coming across Andre Norton's Huon of the Horn. That book wasn't sf, but when I went to read more by her, I discovered everything else was. So I tried a few and that led me to Clifford Simak, Roger Zelazny and any number of other fine sf writers. These days my reading tastes remain eclectic, as you might know if you've been following my monthly book review column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I'm as likely to read Basil Johnston as Stephen King, Jeanette Winterson as Harlan Ellison, Barbara Kingsolver as Patricia McKillip, Andrew Vachss as Parke Godwin—in short, my criteria is that the book must be good; what publisher's slot it fits into makes absolutely no difference to me.

For no matter whether the fairies are seen metaphorically or as real beings inhabiting their own real world, a study of them shows us that those who came before us (and many of that mindset still survive) realized that we are -- no matter what we may think to the contrary -- very little creatures, here for a short time only ('passing through,' as the old people say) and that we have no right to destroy what the next generation will most assuredly need to also see itself through. If only we could learn that lesson, maybe someday we might be worthy of the wisdom of those who knew that to respect the Good People is basically to respect yourself.

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.

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.

SELKIE Alone, the cold body of the selkie man lay upon the sand, so like the drowned one the widow had called for. For her longing, he was hauled upon the sand, exposed to the moonlight. The selkie strained in fraught movements and human form broke from the gleaming seal fur. Undeniably he bore the image of the widow’s lost husband and spoke with the sounds of the dead man’s voice. She hailed back from the rocks. Shadows accumulating beyond the moon’s ability to reform. Colours were washed from sight and silver crashed through her, colder than snow dreams of being. In the dark, the ocean became the rolling flanks of a great beast drifting back across the horizon. Out deep soon, the land’s drop sharp.

On 28 June 1914 the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, a heartland of the South Slavs. Philosophers refer to ‘the inevitable accident’, and this was a very accidental one. Some young Serb terrorists had planned to murder him as he paid a state visit. They had bungled the job, throwing a bomb that missed, and one of them had repaired to a café in a side street to sort himself out. The Archduke drove to the headquarters of the governor-general, Potiorek (where he was met by little girls performing folklore), and berated him (the two men were old enemies, as the Archduke had prevented the neurasthenic Potiorek from succeeding an elderly admirer as Chief of the General Staff). The Archduke went off in a rage, to visit in hospital an officer wounded by the earlier bomb. His automobile moved off again, a Count Harrach standing on the running board. Its driver turned left after crossing a bridge over Sarajevo’s river. It was the wrong street, and the driver was told to stop and reverse. In reverse gear such automobiles sometimes stalled, and this one did so - Count Harrach on the wrong side, away from the café where one of the assassination team was calming his nerves. Now, slowly, his target drove up and stopped. The murderer, Gavrilo Princip, fired. He was seventeen, a romantic schooled in nationalism and terrorism, and part of a team that stretches from the Russian Nihilists of the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified especially in Dostoyevsky’s prophetic The Possessed and Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Austria did not execute adolescents and Princip was young enough to survive. He was imprisoned and died in April 1918. Before he died, a prison psychiatrist asked him if he had any regrets that his deed had caused a world war and the death of millions. He answered: if I had not done it, the Germans would have found another excuse.

The Name "Arthur" The etymology of the Welsh name Arthur is uncertain, though most scholars favour either a derivation from the Roman gens name Artorius (ultimately of Messapic or Etruscan origin), or a native Brittonic compound based on the root *arto- "bear" (which became arth in Medieval and Modern Welsh). Similar "bear" names appear throughout the Celtic-speaking world. Gildas does not give the name Arthur but he does mention a British king Cuneglasus who had been "charioteer to the bear". Those that favor a mythological origin for Arthur point out that a Gaulish bear goddess Artio is attested, but as yet no certain examples of Celtic male bear gods have been detected. John Morris argues that the appearance of the name Arthur, as applied to the Scottish, Welsh and Pennine "Arthurs", and the lack of the name at any time earlier, suggests that in the early 6th century the name became popular amongst the indigenous British for a short time. He proposes that all of these occurrences were due to the importance of another Arthur, who may have ruled temporarily as Emperor of Britain. He suggests on the basis of archaeology that a period of Saxon advance was halted and turned back, before resuming again in the 570s. Morris also suggests that the Roman Camulodunum, modern Colchester, and capital of the Roman province of Britannia, is the origin of the name "Camelot". The name Artúr is frequently attested in southern Scotland and northern England in the 7th and 8th centuries. For example, Artúr mac Conaing, who may have been named after his uncle Artúr mac Áedáin. Artúr son of Bicoir Britone, was another 'Arthur' reported in this period, who slew Morgan mac Fiachna of Ulster in 620/625 in Kintyre. A man named Feradach, apparently the grandson of an 'Artuir', was a signatory at the synod that enacted the Law of Adomnan in 697. Arthur ap Pedr was a prince in Dyfed, born around 570–580. Given the popularity of this name at the time, it is likely that others were named for a figure who was already established in folklore by that time.

There’s a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there’s no Evil Book about evil and how to be bad. The Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folk-lore about evil people. All we have is the living example of the people who are least good, or our own intuition. ‘So,’ continued Bond, warming to his argument, ‘Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.’ ‘Bravo,’ said Mathis. ‘I’m proud of you. You ought to be tortured every day. I really must remember to do something evil this evening. I must start at once. I have a few marks in my favour – only small ones, alas,’ he added ruefully – ‘but I shall work fast now that I have seen the light. What a splendid time I’m going to have. Now, let’s see, where shall I start, murder, arson, rape? But no, these are peccadilloes. I must really consult the good Marquis de Sade. I am a child, an absolute child in these matters.’ His face fell. ‘Ah, but our conscience, my dear Bond. What shall we do with him while we are committing some juicy sin? That is a problem. He is a crafty person this conscience and very old, as old as the first family of apes which gave birth to him. We must give that problem really careful thought or we shall spoil our enjoyment. Of course, we should murder him first, but he is a tough bird. It will be difficult, but if we succeed, we could be worse even than Le Chiffre.

Even when it comes to war, historical memory has a sadistically short half-life, horrors and their causes gauzily evanescing into familiar folklore in less than the span of a single generation. But most wars throughout history, it is important to remember, have been conflicts over resources, often ignited by resource scarcity, which is what an earth densely populated and denuded by climate change will yield. Those wars don’t tend to increase those resources; most of the time, they incinerate them.

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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.

I used to live a short distance away from a standing stone which, at full moon and/or Midsummer’s Eve, would dance around its field at night, incidentally leaving unguarded a pot of gold which, in theory, was available to anyone who dared to seize it and could run faster than a stone. I went to see it by daylight early on, but for some reason I never found the time to make the short nocturnal journey and check on its dancing abilities. I now realize this was out of fear: I feared that, like so many stones I have met, it would fail to dance. There was a small part of me that wanted the world to be a place where, despite planning officers and EU directives and policemen, a stone might dance. And somewhere there, I think, is the instinct for folklore. There should be a place where a stone dances.

Patients are taught that there is no correct way to bend or lift, one doesn't need to avoid soft chairs or mattresses, corsets and collars are unnecessary, and in general the great number of admonitions and prohibitions that have become part of back pain folklore are simply without foundation, because TMS is a harmless condition, and there is nothing structurally wrong with the back. Running is not bad for the spine; weak abdominal muscles do not cause back pain; strong back muscles do not prevent back pain; it is perfectly all right to arch the back, swim the crawl or breast stroke; man was meant to walk upright (Homo sapiens and his ancestors have been doing so for somewhere between 3 and 4 million years); a short leg does not cause back pain. One could go on and on. (page 110)

Just before noon one sunny summer’s day, three bears were returning home from their morning wander. They lived in a sturdy wooden cabin, unpretentious and rustic. Approaching the house he’d built with his own paws, Daddy Bear felt a sense of satisfaction. The residence blended in with the forest rather than standing out from it. All the construction materials had been ethically sourced. The wood came from trees felled by storms. A thick layer of turf on the roof provided insulation in winter and kept the cabin cool in summer. In addition to being practical, the turf looked pretty. Its grass sprouted straight up like hair jutting from a mythic head. A little too big to be quaint, yet a little too small to be showoffish, the house was just right. And just right was the way Daddy Bear liked things.

There was a smell of mildew, and cat shit, and something wrong…

A swan-maiden came and filled the young sailor’s cup. She bowed her head and went to leave, but before she could Batward grabbed her arm. “A cup for me, too, if you don’t mind,” said the warrior. “Please.” “Are you sure?” asked the woman. Batward nodded. “For too long have I rested these feet on firm land. The sea; she calls to me. I am ready.” “As you wish, m’lord.” The maiden filled Batward’s cup, and then the man stood and raised it high. “A toast to me, and a parting glass to you all — for this drink shall, in Seolho’s fine hall, be my last.” The guests did not cheer or hoot at Batward’s words, for it was known that he had arrived at the hall long before the rest of them. Instead, they bowed their heads and raised a solemn toast. Batward gave a nod to Seolho, and the prince nodded back. And the next day, as the gulls called at dawn, Batward was gone. For a sailor cannot be kept from the sea for long.

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Aubéron and Alberîch present a complete and isolated type of “dwarf” in the medieval literatures, and they appear at a time when the predominant dwarf type in the Germanic regions was the dwarf knight (of which Laurin is the best example), while in France the predominant types were the dwarf servant or the wily dwarf. Our two figures therefore go against the grain of the literary tendencies of the time, but they are too thorough and complete to not be older in origin. When Alberîch appears in the Nibelungenlied he already has a long history, and the same must be true of Aubéron, who did not just spring up out of nowhere in the thirteenth century. The very fact that both these figures show traces of contamination speaks in favor of their antiquity. In short, everything about them reflects folkloric traditions that we know through the folktales.

Small nose and huge mouth Once upon a time, there was an old couple who have problems with their appearance. The man has got a small nose, woman has got a huge mouth. Someday, their neighbor invited them to have dinner. They really wanted to go and have a good time with neighbors but they were nervous what they show their face. they got good idea. He made fake nose by candle, she sewed her mouth. in the party, they talked near the stove. Then his nose began to melt. His wife laughed to see him and her mouth became huge. they were nervous and put they heads down. The neighbor said appearance is not important, we like you because you are so kind. Since then they didn’t care so much about their face and lived happily after. --------- Korean Short Story

The Pugachev rebellion,’ the historian Nicholas Riasanovsky has noted, ‘served to point out again, forcefully and tragically, the chasm between French philosophy and Russian reality.’ The Pugachev rebellion has become enshrined in Russian history and folklore, revered by many peasants and radicals and deplored by the rest of society.

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.

Followers are entities that appear to be linked to the birth, life, death, and destiny of a living man or woman. They are connected to a breathing human throughout life, and though they typically remain unseen throughout a life, they work to protect the human being they are connected to. For ordinary people, the first sighting of the fetch-follower is typically shortly before they die, when this entity departs briefly from them to "go and get their place ready" in the Unseen before returning to guide them away from this life and into the next. Thus, having a vision of the follower is a standard folkloric omen for approaching death. The follower would seem to be the same as the Old Norse fylgja- and it can assume an animal shape as well as a human one. It is the source of an individual's luck and somehow mediates their destiny to them. It's chief service, aside from spiritual protection through life, is to act as a psychopomp in death.

Were those reputed “haunted houses” that seemed to find a place in every neighborhood’s folklore actually infected with the spirits of long-dead inhabitants too stupid to float into the light? Could there be honest-to-goodness vampires haunting the suburbs? Worse, would they be sparkly? Could clans of werewolves be running through the forests, feasting on Boy Scout campsites? Was a family of Sasquatch running the Mountain Equipment Co-op? A Minotaur eking out a living as a short-order cook? Were outer-space aliens to blame for every unexplained disappearance since they taught the Aztecs complex binomial theorems far beyond the comprehension of MIT graduate students?

Lola died in her sleep last time I did not even feel her leave. Lola was a true daughter of the Earth, who inherited an extensive wealth of agricultural techniques from her parents and ancestors. For most of her life, they lived in desolate rural poverty but they never lacked for food. They had little money, but everything else they needed, they got from the abundance that nature gifted them. She lived through the age of big cities and concrete dreams, so farming folks like them had zero support from the government. Lola had told me so many stories about encounters with mining corporations and housing developers along with their private armies who never seem to tire converting more farmlands and rural areas into cash cows. They never cared that these lands were scared and had served communities for many generations. But when the pandemic had hit and the global economy had crashed, everyone turned to the rural folks they had always ignored and abused. My lola made sure that her all her children had the ancient wisdom of their people but also schooled in the ways of the city folks. My mother was the first from their community to make their stories known.

Do provocative stories tell us what it means to be human? Do spine-tingling stories assist us to comprehend what it takes to make our way in an amorphous world littered with anarchy and despair? Is a collection of stories a cognitive effort to draw out conceptual insight and hand down derived wisdom? Is storytelling a therapeutic modality? Does the structural mechanics of folktales, short stories, and novels serve as a storehouse of useful information, or does their precision gadgetry provide for an interactive interface to wring more awareness out of human experience? How does the amorous meandering of a conscientious voice wending its way through beloved stories help us perform our own romantic shape making? Can reading and writing along with telling our personal stories with lyrical realism actually burn new neural routes through the brain? Can merely sharing bands of thought waves connect the reader to the writer, and connect the speaker to the listener?

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.