Folkloric Quotes & Sayings

I liked the idea of creating a new pop-culture, folkloric hero character that I created with 'Django' that I think's gonna last for a long time. And I think as the generations go on and everything, you know, my hope is it can be a rite of passage for black fathers and their sons. Like, when are they old enough to watch 'Django Unchained'? — Quentin Tarantino

The themes of metamorphosis (transformation-particularly
human transformation-and identity (particularly human identity) are drawn from the treasury of pre-class world folklore. The folkloric image of man is intimately bound up with transformation and identity. This combination may be seen with particular clarity in the popular folktale )skazkaj. The folktale image of man-throughout the extraordinary variety of folkloric narratives-always orders itself around the motifs of transformation and identity (no matter how varied in its turn the concrete expression of these motifs might be). — Mikhail Bakhtin

1. Santa Claus is real. However, your parents are folkloric constructs meant to protect and foritfy children against the darknesses of the real world. They are symbols representing the return of the sun and the end of winter, the sacrifice of the king and the eternal fecundity of the queen. They wear traditional vestments and are associated with certain seasonal plants, animals, and foods. After a certain age, no intelligent child continues believing in their parents, and it is embarrassing when one professes such faith after puberty. Santa Claus, however, will never fail us. — Catherynne M Valente

When I was a kid, I really loved watching 'Cinderella.' It's a fantasy, and every girl knows that real life isn't always like these movies, but as a child, I just really loved the story of 'Cinderella.' I found it to be so romantic and just a beautiful movie to watch. — Sara Ramirez

No one expects a Broadway musical comedy to be in the vanguard of what is bohemian, raunchy, folkloric, academic or aggressively experimental. That is not its job. Its job is to synthesize musical and social traditions with high-styled vivacity, especially those that dwell on different sides of the tracks in real life. The highbrow meets the lowbrow; sweet meets hot; uptown, downtown, all around the town. — Margo Jefferson

My mother wasn't rational those last years; if she had been, she would have been horrified by her own behavior. — Lorna Luft

Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called hidden people - or, to put it more plainly, elves - in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free, but, as he put it, we couldn't as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people. — Michael Lewis

Actually, my first group was a folkloric group, an Argentine folkloric group when I was 10. By the time I was 11 or 12 I started writing songs in English. And then after a while of writing these songs in English it came to me that there was no reason for me to sing in English because I lived in Argentina and also there was something important [about Spanish], so I started writing in Spanish. — Gustavo Santaolalla

When one looks back across a chasm of seventy years, through a prism of pulp fiction and bad gangster movies, there is a tendency to view the events of 1933-34 as mythic, as folkloric. To the generations of Americans raised since World War II, the identities of criminals such as Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, "Ma" Barker, John Dillinger, and Clyde Barrow are no more real than are Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality, to an extent that few Americans today know who these people actually were, much less that they all rose to national prominence at the same time. — Bryan Burrough

And it sort of hit me that the very subject matter of the film that I'm dealing with is the key to the most important thing in our lives and that's our relationships. And so we had done all this research showing the job of each individual emotion - you know, fear keeps you safe. It deals with uncertainty. — Pete Docter

Amy Elliot Dunne is like a yeti - coveted and folkloric - ... — Gillian Flynn

It's a good thing that beauty is only skin deep, or I'd be rotten to the core. — Phyllis Diller

My film is in French. It's not something folkloric. It's who we are. There's this tension about immigrants coming in. Will they learn French? Will they adapt? In this film, I'm on the reverse side because Monsieur Lazhar comes from a society where French is also the second language. — Philippe Falardeau

At some of the venues, the audience was so loud we could hardly hear what was happening on stage, which kind of threw us back to 1983, when we had very similar reactions on a much bigger scale. — Roger Andrew Taylor

Long-range missiles with hybrid thermonuclear and necromantic payloads. Grafted and crossbred infantry divisions. Strategic alliances with folkloric, extraplanar, and subterranean entities. Field deployment of weaponized paleofauna. Large-scale saturation of target areas with invasive fungal and floral xeno organisms. Megadeaths and mega-undeaths. This is the Cold War now. An American president must be found who, whatever his other qualifications, is prepared to maintain our competitiveness in this area. I'm afraid that that person is you. — Austin Grossman

[T]he incomparable Diana Wynne Jones, one of the finest mythic fiction writers of our age, who left us too early (due to cancer) two days ago. I'm so grateful to her for the extraordinary books she has left behind, which have inspired a whole generation of younger writers. She was writing brilliant YA fantasy before the genre (as we know it now) even existed; she was writing enchanting "wizard school" books long before Harry Potter was a gleam in Rowling's eye; and her knowledge of how to weave mythic/folkloric themes into contemporary fiction was second to no one's. Diana will be terribly missed, but through her magical stories, her light will stay on. — Terri Windling

Nobody enjoys being on display," said Isabel. But then she thought: Some do, and so she added, "Except actors. And narcissists. — Alexander McCall Smith

A true friend is a gift from God. Since God doesn't exist, guess what? Neither do true friends. — Scott Dikkers