Old Tale Sayings

#1. The old tale of Sleeping Beauty might end happily in French or English, but he was in Russia, and only a fool would want to live through the Russian version of any fairy tale.

Orson Scott Card

#2. O sleep, we are beholden to thee, sleep;
Thou bearest angels to us in the night,
Saints out of heaven with palms.
Seen by thy light
Sorrow is some old tale that goeth not deep;
Love is a pouting child.

Jean Ingelow

#3. Many people think fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales are only for children, but I'm not the only writer to take an old tale and retell it for a sophisticated adult audience.

Kate Forsyth

#4. Of an old tale which every schoolboy knows.

William Whitehead

#5. The ache of empty arms was an old tale to you.

Sara Teasdale

#6. 'Tis an old tale, and often told; But did my fate and wish agree, Ne'er had been read, in story old, Of maiden true betray'd for gold, That loved, or was avenged, like me!

Walter Scott

#7. I sometimes think it's like a weird elastic band. The more tragic your work is, the quicker you snap back. There's a catharsis in telling a miserable old tale; you get rid of demons.

Anne-Marie Duff

#8. Don't think to come over me with th' old tale, that the rich know nothing of the trials of the poor; I say, if they don't know, they ought to know.

Elizabeth Gaskell

#9. I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one's breath before the next disaster.

Robin Hobb

#10. Everyone has to die at some point, so the thought of passing on together while holding hands with my one true love has always sounded like an amazing fairy tale. It reminds me of the old Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet, and of the powerful love they shared.

Shannon Duffy

#11. How can it surprise any of you that loves could break the curse? You, whose very genetic makeup forces you to love so deeply that you can't even survive without your mate? It's no coincidence that the saying is 'love conquers all'. It's a tale as old as time.

Quinn Loftis

#12. I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.

Edgar Allan Poe

#13. The three touchstones that woke Buddha up - sickness, old age, and death - are a pretty good place to start when crafting a tragic tale. And if we need to get more specific: heartbreak, destruction, miscomprehension, natural disasters, betrayal, and the waste of human potential.

Paul Di Filippo

#14. There are so may ways to kills yourself, they're just old-fashioned with their permanganate: do you think I'd take permanganate? I wouldn't want to burn my insides out and live to tell the tale as well: idiots! It's simple, I'd drown myself ... Why be in misery at the last?

Christina Stead

#15. Many still believe that conducting political and economic reforms at the same time is not an Asian way. But this is a fairy-tale. We broke that old stereotype by reforming our political, economic and social systems concurrently since 1990.

Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj

#16. The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, explode slowly, the petals thrown like shards.

Margaret Atwood

#17. The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mash-up of an old episode of Friends, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.

Maureen Corrigan

#18. Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.

Ruth Ozeki

#19. Each hero had a tale, of the old days, and of how he had routed and killed, and set things to right, sometimes to right the right that the hero before him had righted.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#20. I'm always like, 'I can't believe I sound like my mother.' I remember running out of the house telling, 'Put your shoes on or you're going to get sick!' That's an old wives' tale, but it's like some weird mind control that I would be like that.

Eileen Davidson

#21. A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well link'd; Tell not as new what ev'ry body knows; and, new or old, still hasten to a close.

William Cowper

#22. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny.

Herman Melville

#23. I think I hear someone on the stairs. The old wooden boards creak like crazy, and I hear the tell-tale sound of someone walking up the stairs. My heart is practically in my throat now. Then I hear the familiar sound of my old mahogany bedroom door swinging slowly open on squeaky hinges.

April Wilson

#24. I adopted a healthier diet. I take at least a tablespoon of apple-cider vinegar a day. It's an old wives' tale, but it really is one of the best things you can put in your mouth.

Melissa Etheridge

#25. The Hindus became like the atoms of dust scattered in all directions and like a tale of old in the mouths of people.

Rajnikant Puranik

#26. I love that very traditional fairy tale where it's not all 'happily ever after.' I like all that old school, bloody, 'Brothers Grimm' sort of stuff. So you have all those shades of gray in there.

Erin Morgenstern

#27. I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

#28. I love your stories. Tell me a story, Idgie. Go on, you old bee charmer. Tell me a good tall tale. Tell me the one about the lake. ~Ruth Jamison

Fannie Flagg

#29. The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of Job, who becomes human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan.

Stephen King

#30. She crossed her legs and kicked out her feet, clad in thick wool socks and boots big enough to house a little old lady.

Drew Magary

#31. That's the old ecological tale that explains humans' inability to fully appreciate global warming. To wit: if you drop a frog in a pan of hot water, it jumps out. If you drop it in a pan of cold water, then turn the heat up slowly, you can roast it to death.

Clive Thompson

#32. As i sat listening to this old man's tale of murder, rape and disposing of a tortured body, i felt a sense of strength deep in my soul that i could accomplish something similar with the bullies who ruined my life at school".

Christopher

Stuart Francis

#33. Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
into a spirit world
speaking with the gift of tongues.

Anne Sexton

#34. Tous mes anciens amours vont me revenir.'
- All my old loves will be returned to me

Carolyn Turgeon

#35. The old wives' tale about cold showers is false: blasting your body with a couple gallons of ice water doesn't make you any less horny. It just makes you horny and cold.

Nenia Campbell

#36. Real life is not quite as it is in stories. In the old tales, bad things happen, and when the tale has unfolded and come to its triumphant conclusion, it is as if the bad things had never been. Life is not as simple as that, not quite.

Juliet Marillier

#37. Tale as old as time,

Danielle L. Jensen

#38. There is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

#39. History is not just a tale of men's making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past.

Bernard Cornwell

#40. In a cottage deep in the forest lived the wicked old witch ... it was a cottage out of the nastier kind of fairy tale

Terry Pratchett

#41. Every fairy tale needs a good old-fashioned villain.

MORIARTY

#42. You're the Baba Yaga?" He gazed at her in disbelief. "But the Baba Yaga is an ugly old crone, and you're, you're... not!

Deborah Blake

#43. TWENTY bridges from Tower to Kew -
Wanted to know what the River knew,
Twenty Bridges or twenty-two,
For they were young, and the Thames was old
And this is the tale that River told:

Rudyard Kipling

#44. A common question asked of Mr. Fenn was, "How old is the boy?" to which Mr. Fenn's reply, year after year, was, "He has been somewhere between twelve and thirteen since the day I laid eyes on him.

Christopher Daniel Mechling

#45. I think the big thing is the fairy tale. It's taking old folk fairy tales and retelling them in modern day. I think it's just taking you out of everyday life, and everyone loves a good fairy tale.

Lily Collins

#46. An old Ukrainian proverb warns, "A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil." That is a risk we have to take.

Tom Robbins

#47. In this night, pure and everlasting, like an old fairy tale, being Turkish felt infinitely better than being poor.

Orhan Pamuk

#48. My wife was of slight stature and weighed no more than a box of old books. Folded as she was, she fitted snugly into the trunk.

Stephen Livingston

#49. You and me Haymitch.Very cozy.Picnics, birthdays, long winter nights sitting around the fire retelling old Hunger Games tale.
-Peeta Mellark

Suzanne Collins

#50. And she began the oft-told tale of a lady of imperial descent who could find no husband in the narrow circle where her pride permitted her to mate, and had lived on unwed, her age now thirty, and would die unwed, for no one would have her now.

E. M. Forster

#51. My inspiration is my life, what I see happening around me. It can be history and, quite often, plain traditional fairy tales. But I never adapt; I nourish myself with old stories, and then create my own tales.

Michel Ocelot

#52. There is a tale, as old as the Ancient Ones themselves, that one would arise who has that gift: to sing all the chantments, the high notes and the low, the swift rhythms and the slow. And this person would be more powerful than even the Ancient Ones were, as powerful as the gods themselves.

Kate Constable

#53. Once upon a time ... " "In the beginning was ... " That's the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives' tale blues riff begins with "Woke up this mornin' ...

Steven Tyler

#54. Apparently, fate was intent on making this a teaching moment. The lessons? You never become immune to new pain, you don't get credit for old pain and it ain't up to you to decide when you've had your share of it.

Christine Bell

#55. The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be ...

Henry James

#56. Nothing a recovering addict likes more than a tale of how bad it had been in the old days, and how low a fellow addict had sunk. Let the one-downsmanship begin.

Lev Grossman

#57. I do not know the meaning of my sadness; there is an old fairy tale that I cannot get out of my mind.

Heinrich Heine

#58. For example, the notion that getting chilled can cause one to catch a cold is dismissed as an old wives' tale by many usually reliable sources.

Sherry Seethaler

#59. No way. I would rather lick a toad. I would let a wicked old hag bake me into gingerbread before I married this son of a bas-ilisk who had the gall to look amused while I hyperventilated.

Betsy Schow

#60. An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.

Stephen Jay Gould

#61. With a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you; with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.

Philip Sidney

#62. 'Snow White' is an old fairy tale, so obviously the idea of vanity and obsession with youth is long-standing. With today's science, people have become crazy with trying to move their face around. It's bizarre.

Julia Roberts

#63. It's like what you might call Goldilocks' dilemma in the old fairy tale. Young men see women as "less than" or "better than," but never their equals. And studies indicate that equality is the best foundation for a healthy relationship.

Michael Kimmel

#64. Once in a while, in the middle of an ordinary life ... love gives us a fairy tale." "It's how I feel," he said, swallowing hard. "I think I've been in love with you since I was fifteen years old.

Melissa Brown

#65. I'll tell you a secret.
Old storytellers never die.
They disappear into their own story.

Vera Nazarian