Urban Legend Quotes

I've heard of a guy in Chicago who advertises in the phone book under "Wizard",though that's probably a urban legend.

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

Look, this is all very, very weird. Why are you focusing on rumours and urban legends? You haven’t even asked me any normal questions.” “Normal questions? Like what?” “Like, I don’t know, like if Lynch had any enemies.” “Did Lynch have any enemies?” “Well, not that I know of, no.” “Then there really was no point in me asking that, was there? Unless you wanted to distract me. You didn’t want to distract me, did you, Kenny?” “No, that’s not—” “Are you playing a game with me, Kenny?” “I don’t know what you’re—” Inspector Me leaned forward. “Did you kill him?” “No!” “It’d be OK if you did.” Kenny recoiled, horrified. “How would that be OK?” “Well,” Me said, “maybe not

There are so many subtle ways we women subconsciously protect ourselves throughout the day; protect ourselves from shadows, from unseen predators. From cautionary tales and urban legends. So subtle, in fact, that we hardly even realize we’re doing them.

If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken. If you play outside alone, soon you won’t be going home. If your window’s left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass. If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.

The devil finds work for idle hands. Bad thoughts find empty heads.

His face was a ghost story: graveyard eyes, cheekbones as sharp as urban legends, a sealed-coffin mouth.

Those of us who do like visitors have to advertise, and it’s tricky to find a way of doing it that doesn’t make you sound crazy. The majority rely on word of mouth, though younger mages use the Internet. I’ve even heard of one guy in Chicago who advertises in the phone book under “Wizard,” though that’s probably an urban legend.

We tell stories of the dead as a way of making a sense of the living. More than just simple urban legends and campfire tales, ghost stories reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we can’t talk about in any other way. The past we’re most afraid to speak aloud of in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.

I’m going to check the world’s best source for spawning new urban legends, the Internet. What, you thought I couldn’t even type? The Web is just another threshold between one world and another.

I try to imitate the effortless grace that Day and Pascao have in this urban jungle.

I always thought the allusive “O” that girls always talked about was an urban legend, but Connor is quickly turning me into a believer.

Adrien treated heterosexuality like an urban legend.

Sure, I hung out around Red Witch Bridge in the middle of the night, but that was in the cover of the trees with an urban legend and a baseball bat as weapons.

Once a mysterious and illogical thing happens in the area, gossips quickly spread and very soon turn into urban legends.

The seed of an urban legend finding fertile soil at the corner of tragedy and imagination.

Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted. There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths.

That’s the funny thing about guns; even untrained hands can feel powerful using them. But take that gun away and you’re left with nothing but a coward whose only skill is how to blindly pull a trigger.

You ever hear about that experiment an American journalist did in Moscow in the 1970s? He just lined up at some building, nothing special about it, just a random door. Sure enough, someone got in line behind him, then a couple more, and before you knew it, they were backed up around the block. No one asked what the line was for. They just assumed it was worth it. I can’t say if that story was true. Maybe it’s an urban legend, or a cold war myth. Who knows?

People go on and on about boobs and butts and teeny waists, but the clavicle is the true benchmark of female desirability. It is a fetish item. Without visible clavicles you might as well be a meatloaf in the sexual marketplace. And I don't mean Meatloaf the person, who has probably gotten laid lotsa times despite the fact that his clavicle is buried so deep as to be mere urban legend, because our culture does not have a creepy sexual fascination on the bones of meaty men. Only women. Show us your bones, they say. If only you were nothing but bones.

More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it's too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing - a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and - irritable murder. Irritable murder, there's a pretty and terrifying phrase for you. - Touched with Fire

They say when you meet somebody that looks just like you, you die.

This was an urban legend that didn't make it on to Snopes.com

Even if most of the urban legends were fictitious, Ellie had a ghost dog companion. When it came to strange stuff, she could not be too open-minded.

The same is true of stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But [the extermination of proper place names] (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order.' The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all...There isn't anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything.

When we offer forgiveness to those who have no excuse—and for things most of the world would consider unforgivable—we become most like Jesus.

Reminds me of that urban legend about hearing voices in the white noise of a television tuned to a station that's off the air

No child has ever been kidnapped from Disneyland. This is one of many Disneyland urban legends that don't have a basis in fact. The kidnap stories-- urban legends.

I've heard urban legends about the safety of a mothers arms and that sounds pretty good right now.

A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was clearly the Western World's substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convolsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend.

There are a number of good books that draw upon fox legends -- foremost among them, Kij Johnson's exquisite novel The Fox Woman. I also recommend Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters (with the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano);  Larissa Lai's unusual novel, When Fox Is a Thousand; Helen Oyeyemi's recent novel, Mr. Fox; and Ellen Steiber's gorgeous urban fantasy novel, A Rumor of Gems, as well as her heart-breaking novella "The Fox Wife" (published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears). For younger readers, try the "Legend of Little Fur" series by Isobelle Carmody.  You can also support a fine mythic writer by subscribing to Sylvia Linsteadt's The Gray Fox Epistles: Wild Tales By Mail.  For the fox in myth, legend, and lore, try: Fox by Martin Wallen; Reynard the Fox, edited by Kenneth Varty; Kitsune: Japan's Fox of Mystery, Romance, and Humour by Kiyoshi Nozaki;Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative by Raina Huntington; The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling by Leo Tak-hung Chan; and The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship, by Karen Smythers.

Fairy tales, fantasy, legend and myth...these stories, and their topics, and the symbolism and interpretation of those topics...these things have always held an inexplicable fascination for me," she writes. "That fascination is at least in part an integral part of my character — I was always the kind of child who was convinced that elves lived in the parks, that trees were animate, and that holes in floorboards housed fairies rather than rodents. You need to know that my parents, unlike those typically found in fairy tales — the wicked stepmothers, the fathers who sold off their own flesh and blood if the need arose — had only the best intentions for their only child. They wanted me to be well educated, well cared for, safe — so rather than entrusting me to the public school system, which has engendered so many ugly urban legends, they sent me to a private school, where, automatically, I was outcast for being a latecomer, for being poor, for being unusual. However, as every cloud does have a silver lining — and every miserable private institution an excellent library — there was some solace to be found, between the carved oak cases, surrounded by the well–lined shelves, among the pages of the heavy antique tomes, within the realms of fantasy. Libraries and bookshops, and indulgent parents, and myriad books housed in a plethora of nooks to hide in when I should have been attending math classes...or cleaning my room...or doing homework...provided me with an alternative to a reality I didn't much like. Ten years ago, you could have seen a number of things in the literary field that just don't seem to exist anymore: valuable antique volumes routinely available on library shelves; privately run bookshops, rather than faceless chains; and one particular little girl who haunted both the latter two institutions. In either, you could have seen some variation upon a scene played out so often that it almost became an archetype: A little girl, contorted, with her legs twisted beneath her, shoulders hunched to bring her long nose closer to the pages that she peruses. Her eyes are glued to the pages, rapt with interest. Within them, she finds the kingdoms of Myth. Their borders stand unguarded, and any who would venture past them are free to stay and occupy themselves as they would.

Most citizens of Leo Mega consider the ARK rebels an urban legend—the fable of a community beyond the walls, deep in the jungle, it has been told for the last sixty to eighty years. However, with a recent increase in gossip on the subject, more citizens have been enticed to escape.

When Rin Tin Tin first became famous, most dogs in the world would not sit down when asked. Dogs performed duties: they herded sheep, they barked at strangers, they did what dogs do naturally, and people learned to interpret and make use of how they behaved. The idea of a dog's being obedient for the sake of good manners was unheard of. When dogs lived outside, as they usually did on farms and ranches, the etiquette required of them was minimal. But by the 1930s, Americans were leaving farms and moving into urban and suburban areas, bringing dogs along as pets and sharing living quarters with them. At the time, the principles of behavior were still mostly a mystery -- Ivan Pavlov's explication of conditional reflexes, on which much training is based, wasn't even published in an English translation until 1927. If dogs needed to be taught how to behave, people had to be trained to train their dogs. The idea that an ordinary person -- not a dog professional -- could train his own pet was a new idea, which is partly why Rin Tin Tin's performances in movies and onstage were looked upon as extraordinary.

anxiety is often the result of a loss of control, and that one of the most effective ways to combat it is to empower oneself;

violently threw up on the floor and myself. It was all blood. I passed out to the sound of Mom screaming.

So what does that make me? Damaged?

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

[American Ice Cream] In America,there are ice cream trucks patrolling neighborhoods all the time. Even without going to the store, customers can score a variety of flavors in bright reds, blues, and beyond, As if that's not enough, the calorie-starved consumer can even buy massive buckets if ice cream, There legendary super-sized portions are NOT urban legends.

The legend of ‘The One’ had been clear that the connection between a werewolf and his mate could never be denied. The fact that it could be destroyed had never come up in conversation.

That's what drives science though: trying to find out the way things are, the way they were, and the way it really works. If that is your goal, then you want to make sure that your information is accurate, and if it's not, then it doesn't matter how much you liked that old urban legend or fictional factoid you once bought into. You will discard it, and be embarrassed by it, seeking instead for truth.

Late last night, the internet exploded. If you frequent certain types of conspiracy theory communities on sites like Reddit and Tumblr, you are probably aware of the name ‘gottiewrites’. She’s infamous, already on her way to becoming an urban legend at the age of seventeen. If you live outside of the internet, you will never have heard of her. Yet her actions have real-world implications that have rippled far beyond a sub-reddit.

No, she would never try to explain such a thing to her husband. It would ruin whatever small bit of credibility she had left. Her intuition, her feelings didn't matter to him-they were unbelievable, in fact. That was the precise word- unbelievable - in the manner of tall tales, urban legends, folk remedies, aliens, mythical creatures rumored to roam the woods, and so her feelings were immediately discounted, even though she knew them to be the truest things in her human experience, a light to show the way.

The magazine piece on the urban legend had stated ‘at the end of the day whether one returns to the past or travels to the future, the present does not change. So it raises the question: just what is the point of that chair?' But Kazu still goes on believing that no matter what difficulties people face, they will always have the strength to over come them. It just takes heart. And if the chair can change someone’s heart, it clearly has its purpose. But with her cool expression, she will just say ‘drink the coffee before it gets cold.

After receiving such a warm welcome, it sounded to me like the Directorate of Intelligence had placed me on the CIA’s “don’t screw with this guy list”. This list was something of an urban legend throughout The Company. Once on it, you had it made. Everyone at the CIA would go out of his or her way to be helpful and red tape would magically vanish for you. It meant that you had a very powerful patron at the top levels of the Agency. I may have been hustled out of Headquarters but I apparently still had a very powerful friend in high places.

The human parallels are important here, because the legend of the urban pit bull would become a literal companion piece to America’s failed war on drugs. When a dog scare collides with a drug scare—especially one as racialized as the crack “epidemic”—the effects are multiplicative.

Kyle would point out that snipers, especially in urban warfare, decrease the number of civilian casualties. Sniper teams are generally pinpoint strikers, their jobs the combat equivalent of a scalpel cut. Plus, he said, “I will reach out and get you however I can if you’re threatening American lives.

On average, 75 people are arrested in the United States for having sex with the deceased every year. Don’t believe me? Look it up: 75 people. This is especially concerning considering there are four states, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and North Carolina, where necrophilia isn’t even against the law.

Before Nancy and I had children of our own, I would have titled a sermon on raising children something like “Ten Rules for Raising Godly Kids.” But birth by birth, the titles changed. The progression went something like this: “Ten Rules for Raising Godly Kids” “Ten Guidelines for Raising Good Kids” “Five Principles for Raising Kids” “Three Suggestions for Surviving Parenthood

The torta, Mexico’s version of the sandwich, is the quintessential comida capitalina – urban fast food that is both European and truly Mexican. According to legend, they were invented at the turn of the 20th century by one Sr. Armando, an Italian immigrant, as his riff on the Italian pannino, adapting it to available ingredients and the locals’ penchant for avocado and chili.

Not to mention the fact that the belief in conspiracy theories is already a form of conspiracy theory in itself. It's to me not quite clear on what basis you would assume that one conspiracy is no conspiracy, and the others are. Capitalism drives on conspiracy theories as well: they believe in a certain power that creates a "free market" and that you can sit and grow forever on finite resources. This newspaper article obviously did not mean 'conspiracy theory' but 'urban legend', because the question if there are ufos landing on earth and whether you want to believe this seems to have little to do with conspiracy. And whether that is an urban legend worthy of belief is not undisputed. I think people who believe in such things are actually less illogical than people who believe housing associations are useful.

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. But being physically infected with a virulent strain of the Asherah virus makes you a whole lot more susceptible. The only thing that keeps these things from taking over the world is the Babel factor - the walls of mutual incomprehension that compartmentalize the human race and stop the spread of viruses. Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust.

Walker-thinkers have found various ways to accommodate the gifts that their walking brings. Caught paperless on his walks in the Czech enclaves of Iowa, maestro Dvořák scribbles the string quartets that visited his brain on his starched white shirt cuffs (so the legend goes). More proactively, Thomas Hobbes fashioned a walking stick for himself with an inkwell attached, and modern poet Mary Oliver leaves pencils in the trees along her usual pathways, in case a poem descends during her rambles.

[…] if sophistication is the ability to put a smile on one's existential desperation, then the fear of a glossy sheen is actually the fear that surface equals depth. *** […] we wake up, we do something—anything—we go to sleep, and we repeat it about 22,000 more times, and then we die. *** Part of our new boredom is that our brain doesn't have any downtime. Even the smallest amount of time not being engaged creates a spooky sensatino that maybe you're on the wrong track. Reboot your computer and sit there waiting for it to do its thing, and within seventeen seconds you experience a small existential implosion when you remember that fifteen years ago life was nothing but this kind of moment. Gosh, mabe I'll read a book. Or go for a walk. Sorry. Probably not going to happen. Hey, is that the new trailer for Ex Machina? *** In the 1990s there was that expression, "Get a life!" You used to say it to people who were overly fixating on some sort of minutia or detail or thought thread, and by saying, "Get a life," you were trying to snap them out of their obsession and get them to join the rest of us who are still out in the world, taking walks and contemplating trees and birds. The expression made sense at the time, but it's been years since I've heard anyone use it anywhere. What did it mean then, "getting a life"? Did we all get one? Or maybe we've all not got lives anymore, and calling attention to one person without a life would put the spotlight on all of humanity and our now full-time pursuit of minutia, details and tangential idea threads. *** I don't buy lottery tickets because they spook me. If you buy a one-in-fifty-million chance to win a cash jackpoint, you're simultaneously tempting fate and adding all sorts of other bonus probabilities to your plance of existence: car crashes, random shootings, being struck by a meteorite. Why open a door that didn't need opening? *** I read something last week and it made sense to me: people want other people to do well in life but not too well. I've never won a raffle or prize or lottery draw, and I can't help but wonder how it must feel. One moment you're just plain old you, and then whaam, you're a winner and now everyone hates you and wants your money. It must be bittersweet. You hear all those stories about how big lottery winners' lives are ruined by winning, but that's not an urban legend. It's pretty much the norm. Be careful what you wish for and, while you're doing so, be sure to use the numbers between thirty-two and forty-nine.

There were strange stories going around about adults who preyed on children. Not just for sex, but for food. Hyuck was told about people who would drug children, kill them, and butcher them for meat. Behind the station near the railroad tracks were vendors who cooked soup and noodles over small burners, and it was said that the gray chunks of meat floating in the broth were human flesh. Whether urban legend or not, tales of cannibalism swept through the markets. Mrs. Song heard the stories from a gossipy ajumma she had met there. “Don’t buy any meat if you don’t know where it comes from,” she warned darkly. The woman claimed she knew somebody who had actually eaten human flesh and proclaimed it delicious. “If you didn’t know, you’d swear it was pork or beef,” she whispered to a horrified Mrs. Song. The stories got more and more horrific. Supposedly, one father went so insane with hunger that he ate his own baby. A market woman was said to have been arrested for selling soup made from human bones. From my interviews with defectors, it does appear that there were at least two cases—one in Chongjin and the other in Sinuiju—in which people were arrested and executed for cannibalism. It does not seem, though, that the practice was widespread or even occurred to the degree that was chronicled in China during the 1958-62 famine, which killed as many as 30 million people.

Forget morality tales and all the fury and mire of human complexity, and follow the money. It will lead you through urban legends about sex and revenge and jealousy and the acquisition of power over others, but ultimately, it will lead you to the issue from which all the other motivations derive—money, piles of it, green and lovely and cascading like leaves out of a beneficent sky, money and money and money, the one item that human beings will go to any lengths to acquire.

She looked at him and felt a dagger pierce her heart, then she felt a warm chocolate feeling swallow her senses.

When we offer forgiveness to those who have no excuse—and for things most of the world would consider unforgivable—we become most like Jesus. Remember, he died for sins he never committed to forgive people who had no right to be forgiven.

Then there's Daniel. He's the poster child for hanging tough and doing the right thing no matter what. All he had to do to avoid the horrifying prospect of being eaten alive by lions was to stop publicly praying to God for thirty days. Thirty days. Not forever. Just thirty days.13 But he wouldn't go there. He knew that a path called disobedience was far worse than a valley called death. So he kept praying and ended up in a lion's den. Suppose he'd looked

So you need to understand that blood drinking isn’t just a rare phenomenon. What I am telling you now is not a fantasy story. This is not a myth. This is not an urban legend. This is what is really going on in the real world now. Well-organized cult members systematically abduct people, torture them to adrenalize their blood, harvest that blood and then drink it. And some of these cult members are addicted to drinking adrenalized human blood in the same way that cocaine addicts are addicted to cocaine.

...l'uomo, allo stato di natura, nasce virtuoso; il vizio deriva dalla vita nella società mondane, esposta alle artefatte pressioni urbane.

Created in 1972 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, two friends in their early twenties, Dungeons and Dragons was an underground phenomenon, particularly on college campuses, thanks to word of mouth and controversy. It achieved urban legend status when a student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared in the steam tunnels underneath Michigan State University while reportedly reenacting the game; a Tom Hanks movie called Mazes and Monsters was loosely based on the event.

Mary is the type of patient, who you could say, does not play well with others.

WHAT WE SHOULD learn from urban legends and the Mrs. Johnson trial is that vivid details boost credibility. But what should also be added is that we need to make use of truthful, core details. We need to identify details that are as compelling and human as the “Darth Vader toothbrush” but more meaningful—details that symbolize and support our core idea.

Together, they were legend tripping, the age old practice of visiting strange locations of urban myths. Places such as the Baird chair monument, the Screaming Beaches, or the Spider Gates Cemetery. Popular sites frequently visited by tour groups or rowdy teenagers, locations with a history of the tragic, the horrific, or just plain old supernatural acclaim

An example of this is an urban legend told in some gaming circles about a gazebo.

You told us this place was haunted. How haunted is it?" Paul cast a quick glance at the house. "I'm not sure. When they found the bodies twenty years ago, the place became off-limits. That was horror enough. There were whispers of strange stuff going on before then, but no one is alive who could verify a thing. Somehow, an urban legend grew about the whole island. "Don't go near haunted Ormsby Island. They say a reporter went out alone one night just after the mass murder had been discovered and never came back. Since anyone who had committed the murders was either dead or gone at that point, it had to be the island itself that offed the reporter. Mitch, Ormsby Island isn't even on most maps of Charleston Harbor. Locals will turn away the moment you even say its name.

Spiritual urban legends aren't just harmless misunderstandings. They're spiritually dangerous errors that will eventually bring heartache and disillusionment to all who trust in them.

For most of us, beliefs are intellectual. Acting upon them is optional.

She has magic vagina. I’ve seen this before.” Sami winks. “Boys can’t refuse magic vag.” “If anyone is rocking the magical vag, it’s you.” I roll my eyes. “And what is magic vag, exactly?” Liz cocks her head to the side. “It’s the soul mate to the penis of the manwhore. He wants to, but he can’t fight his need for more of that.” Sami laughs. “It changes him.” “It started out as urban legend, but you’re making shit up now.” I make a face at her and sip my wine.

You’ve probably heard the stories about lottery winners losing it all. They’re not urban legends; they really happen. The depths people fall to after big lottery winnings are heartbreaking and mindboggling. And it isn’t only lottery winners. You’ve also heard the stories about famous movie stars, recording stars, or star athletes who make incredible fortunes, literally hundreds of millions of dollars, and somehow manage to wind up broke and in debt. And when you heard those stories, you probably thought the same thing I did: “Man, I don’t know how they pulled that off, but if I made that kind of money I sure wouldn’t squander it all like that!” But let me ask you a tough question: are you sure about that? Speaking as one who’s made it to the top and then seen it all evaporate, all I can say is, you might be surprised. There’s a reason those lottery winners lose it all again, a reason those shining stars plummet to those dark places: they may have had the big breaks, but they didn’t grasp the slight edge. Their winnings changed their bank account balance—but it didn’t change their philosophy. The purpose of this book is to show you the slight edge philosophy, show you how it works, give you plenty of examples, and show you exactly how to make it a core part of how you see the world and how you live your life every day. Throughout this book, if you look carefully you’ll find dozens of statements that embody this philosophy, statements like “Do the thing, and you shall have the power.” Here are a few more examples that you’ll come across in the following pages: Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do.

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.

Create an “Inner Child” Map. Adults have a different way of viewing things compared to a child, and this activity is a kind of bridge between how you think now as an adult and your inner child. Adults usually prefer to create organizers or charts in order to plan or understand something. This time you will be creating an organizer, more specifically called a semantic map, that can help you discover your inner child. To create an “inner child” map, you can get a picture of yourself as a child, probably around the age of 7 or 8. If you do not have any pictures, then you can simply draw yourself when you were in that age. Place the picture or the drawing at the center of a piece of paper, with enough room for scribbles all around it. Then, begin recalling as much as you can all of the phrases or words that you can associate with this child version of you. Brainstorm on everything, such as your favorite color back then, the gifts that you wanted for Christmas, your nickname, your favorite movie, the book that you kept reading over and over again with a flashlight under your blanket, an imaginary friend, or the silly urban legends that you used to believe in. Once you have finished your “inner child map” you are so much closer to discovering him or her, if you haven’t already.

Mrs. Fritz is wearing her favorite purple, floral dress today. Her deep-set eyes are offset, as usual, by her purple eyeglasses and her almost-explosive frizzy hair. “Those are good examples. Do you all want to hear what my favorite urban legend is?” We nod. “It’s the one about the grandchildren who actually call to say thanks when you send them birthday presents.” We stare at her.

Despite all these issues, I am happy to report that a communication breakdown can sometimes lead to a breakthrough instead of a breakup. A girlfriend of mine has been seeing a guy who, at times, met criteria for all three of the points above . . . yet they worked through it, and just last week, he asked her to be his girlfriend! This is a true story and not an urban legend. So keep the faith, ladies! Keep being open, keep communicating, and keep being clear about what you want, and I truly believe that someday, somewhere, someone will come along who wants the same things as you. And all the guys who came before him will vanish from your mind faster than . . . well, the guys who came before him.

Technology is constantly replacing old jobs with new ones. A hundred years ago no one would have thought of being a computer code writer or a video game designer as a career. Two hundred years ago, no one would have thought of being a movie actress or an airplane pilot. To make way for new jobs, old ones are pushed aside. Today, we see the cashier at large stores being replaced with self-checkout; in a few years, the cashier may be as rare as the full-service gas station attendant.

No one knows for sure where the physical body of Anne went, but her spirit is alive today. Although many would object to her lifestyle, most recognize her as a leader in the women’s rights movement. She receives praise for standing up to her dad when he suggested whom she should marry; she demonstrated that men should not dictate a woman's future.  She is also praised for daring to be a pirate; she did not allow gender to be a barrier to having the career that she wanted. She also receives accolades for being able to handle a sword, gun, and machete as well or better than most of the men on Jack’s boat; she was proof that women were not frail, delicate, and in need of a man’s protection. Perhaps more than any other pirate, Anne continues to influence modern culture

the board game Monopoly was designed by Lizzie Maggie in 1904 as a teaching tool about monopolies and inflation.

Which is stronger, the steel of a ship or an iceberg? If you aren’t sure, just think about the Titanic, the huge “unsinkable” British luxury liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912. When the Titanic ran into the iceberg, the clear winner was the iceberg.

Anne Bonny, History’s Deadliest Female Pirate, Disappeared without a Trace? “As to hanging, it is no great hardship. For were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so unfit the sea, that men of courage must starve.”― Anne Bonny.

Mary and Anne wore traditional women’s clothing around the sailors, but, when prepared for battle, they always dressed in men’s fashion. When called upon to fight, the two women would stand back-to-back, each holding a pistol in one hand and a machete in the other. They literally had each other’s back. For two months in 1720, Jack, Anne, and Mary ruled the seas, and their fame spread far and wide. (You may not realize it, but they are all recalled in modern culture; for instance, Jack flew a black flag with a skull and two criss-crossing sabers imprinted in white on it, and that is the stereotyped pirate flag used in movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean.) A bounty was on Calico Jack’s head, so both other pirates and government officials sailed the seas hoping to capture him. One evening after Calico Jack had captured a large Spanish ship, his crew was celebrating with alcohol and were so intoxicated that the crew of a British government ship was able to come aboard his ship unannounced. Most of Jack’s men were in the ship’s galley and immediately surrendered. Anne and Mary, who were upstairs relaxing with Jack in the captain’s quarters, fought until they were clearly overwhelmed. All the pirates were taken to prison and most sentenced to death.  Anne snarled in frustration as the men were led past her, “If you had just fought like men, you wouldn’t be hanging like dogs.” Anne and Mary, though, both escaped the death penalty – but not prison - because they were pregnant. Anne was found to be carrying Jack’s baby and Mary was carrying a crew member’s child. Mary got a fever and died in prison, but no one knows what happened to Anne.

Hellcat Maggie, you killed decent people tonight. You’re going to pay with your miserable life at sunrise.” Reverend Joe, a homely, overweight man known for dropping to his knees in prayer to avoid work,

Jensen, R. (2002). "No Irish Need Apply": A Myth of Victimization. Journal of Social History,36(2), 405-429. Retrieved August 26, 2021 The Irish American community harbors a deeply held belief that it was the victim of systematic job discrimination in America, and that the discrimination was done publicly in highly humiliating fashion through signs that announced “Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply.” This “NINA” slogan could have been a metaphor for their troubles—akin to tales that America was a “golden mountain” or had “streets paved with gold.” But the Irish insist that the signs really existed and prove the existence of widespread discrimination and prejudice. The fact that Irish vividly remember “NINA” signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic groups complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs that said employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through a window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend? The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. By the 1820s it was a cliché in upper and upper middle-class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. … Irish Americans have all heard about them—and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had “legs”: people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O’Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up.

Cabbage Patch Kids were the must-have toy of 1983. They were dolls that resembled Ross Perot with hair, but they were more lifelike. I read somewhere that they were designed by Ronald Reagan to get children ready to love the mutant children who would be born after the nuclear war that his policies were sure to cause, but it is possible that was just an urban legend.

The scariest Urban Legend Of Them all? It's the Internet. Where people believe, wholeheartedly, the first garbage website they see when Googling!

So, how did you manage to get the story about Bannick and Eileen? It’s all hearsay and third-hand and urban legend, all remembered and told by a bunch of drunk rich kids. Right?” “For the most part, yes.

By now you should realise that if anybody asks if you would like something in a Japanese toilet, it won’t end well.

Don’t blame yourself, Marcus. These gifted children have a defense mechanism, not to speak of or share anything about their abilities. There is, of course, an exception, and in this case, it is the fact that Christopher knows everything. And now, the world is one step away from discovering these gifted children and people are not just urban legends! The Government keeps the few of them under lock and key, they are a strict federal secret, and thanks to this video footage, the planet will soon be upside down.

There are so many subtle ways we women subconsciously protect ourselves throughout the day; protect ourselves from shadows, from unseen predators. From cautionary tales and urban legends. So subtle, in fact, that we hardly even realize we’re doing them. Leave work before dark. Clutch our purses to our chest with one hand, hold our keys between our fingers in the other, like a weapon, as we shuffle toward our car, strategically parked beneath a streetlight in case we weren’t able to leave work before dark. Approach our car, glance in the back seat before unlocking the front. Grip our phone tight, pointer finger just a swipe away from 9-1-1. Step inside. Lock it again. Do not idle. Drive away quickly.

That car is a symbol of human oppression and greed. Sometimes it’s driven by a fallen nun, or a crooked priest. Perhaps even the Devil himself?

She would not speak rudely about someone’s appearance, not out of kindness, but truth. She finds beauty in most people, even if they are not traditionally appealing. Now, if she doesn’t like the contents of a person’s personality, heaven help them. They’d know about it. In her bluntness, she can be a turn-off for some people, but for me, there is comfort in always knowing where you stand with someone.

My frailty has always meant that the pleasures of the flesh have been fewer than a man would desire.

had always been murky, my longevity always in question, I had belonged even when I hadn’t realized it—belonged in the body bespoke for my soul, with a man who accepted me unconditionally.

Each life comprises a million hurts, for the bad experiences sit deeper than the good—it is the way of humans.

I could not bring myself to touch its face, although I wonder to this very day what it would have felt like. Dear God, it moved.

I have lived on borrowed time for decades. Having fleeting energy made a return to malaise unbearable, and my fight wanes.

My imagination has always been rich, a thing cultivated further by a childhood mired in illness, with many months spent reading Gothic novels filled with foreboding moors, mysterious suitors, and unexplained sounds in the dead of night.

In the afternoons he might walk in the garden and practice his knife throwing, before reading or flipping through magazines. He had piles of magazines in every room: Gun Tests, Gun World, Gun Digest, American Survival Guide, Knife, UFO Universe, Soldier of Fortune, subscription copies of National Geographic and the International Herald Tribune, which Bill always read in London and Paris, and the Weekly World News, a fictional news tabloid sold at the supermarket that Bill loved to read that specialized in alien abductions, mutants, “world’s fattest” stories, urban legends, Elvis sightings, and the revelation in 1994 that twelve U.S. senators were aliens from other planets. (...) His collection kept changing, but he normally had seven or eight handguns, two or three shotguns, and three or four rifles. (...) There was also the matter of his small cock. “My cock is four and one-half inches and large cocks bring on my xenophobia.” Ginsberg thought that Bill’s small penis accounted for his obsession with guns, a subject that many academics have mulled over.

Her mother bought her a burgundy pair of VANS summer shoes in Italy, and they took a picture of her laughing happily while holding them in her hand in an exaggerated scene, as if they had been teasing him to take a picture of her for her boyfriend in a park somewhere in Italy. Shortly after, she started wearing them in Barcelona and cut off the tiny VANS logo with a scissor. When I asked her why, she tried to avoid answering at first until she said something like she didn't like it, or that they looked better without the tiny black VANS logos. It was suspicious that someone must have told her the urban legend in Barcelona soon after her Italian vacation, that VANS stands for „Vans Are Nazi Shoes.” It became more and more obvious in Barcelona that my life was in danger, as an awful vibe surrounded us due to the construction. It was mostly caused by rich tourists who I had never seen do much work in life, too high to take on a task as simple as changing a password on a bank account on an iPhone app – a crime organisation, quite international already and increasingly so, with a growing number of participants and secrets becoming more and more dangerous, I thought, and I wasn’t wrong, I just couldn’t see the whole picture yet as I was blindfolded. As if her nickname, Stupid Bunny which she had printed out at Ample Store with Adam, was a cute, nice thing, a reassurance after the day before she had been crying for some unknown reason and printing out the phrase, “You never loved me, you just broke my heart.” That couldn't have been further from the truth. She would fidget around and draw at home, and I didn't realise she was bored of being with me when she had so many other options in her mind because of what others had fed her, as if I was a monogamist who wouldn’t forgive her for cheating or making a mistake. Even if I had seen her, when she showed up at home she seemed in love with herself, watching herself in the mirror in her new tight, short shorts. It was weird. I had noticed something strange in Martina for a while now and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought it was only the drugs she was secretly doing behind my back, but I was far away from having all the answers.

muse to the nickname and urban legend of “Bloody Mary.