Top 68 Old Tales Quotes
#1. A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, ... not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.
Salman Rushdie
#2. Eastward the dawn rose, ridge behind ridge into the morning, and vanished out of eyesight into guess; it was no more than a glimmer blending with the hem of the sky, but it spoke to them, out of the memory and old tales, of the high and distant mountains.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#3. So we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies.
William Shakespeare
#4. 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
#5. They say in the old tales that when a man and woman exchange looks the way we did, their spirits mingle. their gaze is a rope of gold binding each other. even if they never meet again, they carry a little of the other with them always. they can never forget, and they can never be wholly happy again
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#6. Ava's father believed that myths and fairy tales - like dreams - opened a window into the unconscious. by listening to the language of dreams and old tales, he said, all humans could learn to understand themselves and the world, better.
Kate Forsyth
#7. Aye, it's the heart of the craft, the love and sweat that you put into it. If you think about the old tales, the magic comes from inside the person who creates it. - Conn
N.W. Moors
#8. The old tales of China tell us that all things may grow and change. A stone may become a plant. A plant may become an animal. An animal may become a human. A human may become a god.
Just so, a snake may become a woman. And we are told of one who did.
Aaron Shepard
#9. Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused
hence all the old tales of elfin kingdoms moving further and further away from our world, or that magical beings require our faith, our belief in their existence, to survive. That is a lie. All they require is our recognition.
Charles De Lint
#10. As you travel around Slovenia,
Think of the tales the hills could tell you.
Share the awe of natural wonder;
Tread the trails, but as you wander
Honor the age-old endeavors to be
Literate, informed, democratic and free.
Jacqueline Widmar Stewart
#11. Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.
Theodore Dreiser
#13. Is there anything more tedious than the often repeated tales of the old and forgetful?
Charles Caleb Colton
#14. Again, if there are really no fairies, why do people believe in them, all over the world? The ancient Greeks believed, so did the old Egyptians, and the Hindoos, and the Red Indians, and is it likely, if there are no fairies, that so many different peoples would have seen and heard them?
Andrew Lang
#15. A traditionalist's values are gleaned from all that is good in the past.
Fennel Hudson
#16. And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#17. I needed to go into that bare, with nothing from my own life on my body, the way woodcutters' children in fairy tales have to leave their protections behind to enter the enchanted castle; the way votaries in old religions used to go naked to their initiation rites.
Tana French
#18. Old wives' tales are not enough in a day when old wives and old men, too, are constantly moving away from their labours.
Vincent Massey
#19. When will you understand that your childish beliefs mean an absolute nothing in this wild universe! When will you be serious? When will you give up deceiving yourself? When will you stop believing in the tales of old times as if they are true?
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#20. May you never grow too old to believe in magic and fairy tales.
Misty Dawn Seidel
#21. The only thing we'll be handing you is your head. (Fraser)
Ooo. Scary. Have you ever thought of making up children's tales? You might actually succeed in frightening a two-year-old. (Sin)
Kinley MacGregor
#22. Generally speaking, it has been my ambition to write as a good old nurse will speak when she tells fairy tales.
Joseph Jacobs
#23. Old wives' tales - that is, worthless stories, untruths, trivial gossip, a derisive label that allots the art of storytelling to women at the exact same time as it takes all value from it.
Angela Carter
#24. Once upon a time fairy tales were told to audiences of young and old alike. It is only in the last century that such tales were deemed fit only for small children, stripped of much of their original complexity, sensuality, and power to frighten and delight.
Terri Windling
#25. One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That's where the old stuff came from.
Terri Windling
#26. I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen.
[From a column dated November 17, 1928]
Dorothy Parker
#27. Some have ideas. You know how old chickens scratch and gabble. That's how the tales started, all the gossip, the wondering, all the things people said without knowing and then believed, since they heard it with their own ears, from their own lips, each word.
Louise Erdrich
#28. Although Branwen had no patience for dry lists of names and dates, she had always loved the thrilling tales of the old wars that were told and retold around the hearth in the Great Hall of Garth Milain.
Allan Frewin Jones
#29. One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#30. A good book is like a good friend, do you know, Lacey? One you can turn to when the night is cold and you are lonely. And there is old Herodotus, standing ready to regale me with tales of his travels.
Ashley Gardner
#31. In winter's tedious nights sit by the fire With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales Of woeful ages, long ago betid
William Shakespeare
#32. All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for impostors to preach and fools to believe.
Thomas Paine
#33. Because, no matter how old we get, we always need to believe in fairytales.
Kristen Ashley
#34. And finally there was The Goode Childe's Booke of Faerie Tales, so old that it belonged to an age when there were far more e's around.
Terry Pratchett
#35. Harlem is not a playground for rich bankers and consultants. It's got students of all colors. It's got old people who keep history and tell tall tales.
Marcus Samuelsson
#36. Pay heed to the tales of old wives. It may well be that they alone keep in memory what it was once needful for the wise to know.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#37. The tales lovers tell each other about how they met are hushed and secret things. They change year by year, for we all meet many times as we grow up and become different and new and exciting people
and this never stops, even for a minute, even when we are ninety.
Catherynne M Valente
#38. In winter, the Icelanders told the tales of the brave men of old in their families, and so the tradition was handed on from father to son, the same stories told every winter, till all the particulars became well known.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#39. In spite of all the dishonour,
the broken standards, the broken lives,
The broken faith in one place or another,
There was something left that was more than the tales
Of old men on winter evenings.
T. S. Eliot
#40. She's as old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death.
Neil Gaiman
#41. 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
#42. One evening, after a particularly terrible row, the prince smashed his princess over the head with an old wooden clock and she tumbled to the floor, dead.
Brooke Warra
#43. Some dark nights hide the cruelest of secrets. Such are the tales of the dark shadows hidden in that old castle in a distant land. The story of ages started with a classic; highlighting the infamous monster made out of a man.
Adhish Mazumder
#44. And you must tell the child the legends I told you
as my mother told them to me and her mother to her. You must tell the fairy tales of the old country. You must tell of those not of the earth who live forever in the hearts of the people ...
Betty Smith
#46. The old fairy tales are very, very violent, and these days I think we could do with a little less of it.
Julie Andrews
#47. In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.
Cormac McCarthy
#48. 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
#49. A son," the Queen said, and her smile lit up the room. "Will I give birth soon?"
The old woman nodded.
"When?"
The old woman reached out and rested her hand on top of the basket, watched the Queen's eyes darken. "When he's more beautiful than you.
Wheeler Scott
#50. I sense the joy of young and old,
I hear wondrous tales told,
Beauty surrounds me as I gaze above,
But I am alone for I live without love.
Anonymous
#51. He tells old wives' tales much to the point.
Horace
#52. Old wives' tales have hurt cats. They're not true! Who are those Old Wives?
Darlene Arden
#53. In the December rain, the vicarage was especially damp and soggy, with an aura of boiled eggs and old books - a perfect setting for our encounter: dark, brooding, and simply reeking of secrets and tales told in an earlier time. Cynthia,
Alan Bradley
#54. I'll tell you a secret.
Old storytellers never die.
They disappear into their own story.
Vera Nazarian
#55. So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is - other people!
Jean-Paul Sartre
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Pan took the joke good-naturedly, probably deciding it wasn't a good idea to argue with a fifteen-year-old who had just pulled two people up ten feet.
Grace Anthony
#59. Why should I laugh?' asked the old man. 'Madness in youth is true wisdom. Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it.
Andrew Lang
#60. We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest.
James Elroy Flecker
#61. It is no news to me that tales of hidden races are as old as all mankind.
H.P. Lovecraft
#62. Children are much more understanding of the suddenness and arbitrariness of death than we are. The old fairy tales contain a lot of that, and we've stolen from them, just as they stole from Greek myth, which has that same mixture of pre-Christian chaos.
Emma Thompson
#63. She talks like you. It's not every day you hear a four-year-old say Prince Charming is a douchebag who's only holding Cinderella back."
"That's my girl.
Emma Chase
#64. Half the lies I tell are not true. To tell you the truth, half the true tales I tell are lies.
Jack Thanatos
#65. In the stories, the old fairy tales, a hero comes. But all my heroes are gone or dead. No one is coming for me.
Victoria Aveyard
#66. No one is too old for fairy tales.
Nick Lake
#67. Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
C.S. Lewis
#68. Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!
Charles Lamb
