Quotes & Sayings About Sagas

Zach had been on the receiving end of a few of Lanning's ass-chewings back in the day. They were epic sagas of righteous fury and perfectly applied touches of profanity. It was like being verbally disemboweled. — Christopher Farnsworth

I was weaned not on television or Wild West sagas but on stories of nationalism and patriotism. I would sit at my mother's feet by the hour and drink in these exciting tales of the freedom fighters in our family. — Sukarno

Museums should no longer concern themselves with history on a grand scale, the sagas of kings and heroes, or the forging of national identities; they should focus instead on the lives and belongings of ordinary people, just as modern novels do. — Orhan Pamuk

The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty, and rape. Many ancient works do that - The Iliad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling the Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their — Richard Dawkins

Icelandic peoples were the ones who memorized sagas ... We were the first rappers of Europe. — Bjork

Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas, The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space. (Cape Hatteras — Hart Crane

Why vampires? You write centuries-long family sagas - why not write historical epics without any hint of the supernatural?"

"Well, that would be boring, wouldn't it?"

"Yeah, God only knows what Tolstoy was thinking. — Carrie Vaughn

It usually takes me about three years to research and write one of my historical sagas; this is one reason why I take medieval mystery breaks, for they can be completed in only a year. — Sharon Kay Penman

Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under a spell, men who had been turned into birds or even more likely into some strange beast, and who bore their magic shapes with the same unflurried equanimity, magnanimity, and dignity that we children had marvelled at the beasts of fairy tale. Did they not suspect, moreover, with the wordless apprehension of animals, that if their magic shapes were to be stripped from them the fairy tale would be at an end and their security gone, too, while real life would begin with all it's problems, perhaps in some town where there was neither nature or mirage, no link with the folk-tale and the past, no ancient path to the far side of the mountains and down to the river gullies and out beyond the grass plains, no landmarks from the Sagas? - Only a restless search for sterile, deadening enjoyment. — Halldor Laxness

A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems. — Antony Beevor

I read a bit of the Icelandic sagas. They're fascinating in that they are completely ordinary. The farmer will go off into the hills and fight a troll, and then go back and do ordinary things. It's an odd mix of fantasy and reality. — Jonathan Stroud

We think that it's the big moments that define our lives-the wedding, the baby, the new house, the dream job. But really, these big moments of happiness are just the punctuation marks of our personal sagas. The narrative is written every day in the small, the simple, and the common. In your tiny choices, in these tiny changes. In the unconsidered. The overlooked. The discarded. The reclaimed. — Sarah Ban Breathnach

Sagas wouldn't be interesting if terrible things didn't happen to the people in them. — Jack Campbell

Arguably, the relationship between Liza Minnelli and Judy Garland is one of the great mother-daughter sagas of all time. Certainly, for certain people, and a lot of them, Liza is the bigger star. Liza is the more kind of viable legend, shall we say. Then there's the other camp, where Judy is the one. — Rufus Wainwright

The Danes had a great love of sea stories and the old sagas. Snorri provided the former from personal experience and Kara the latter from her vast store of such trivia. I half-thought some of the duke's men would volunteer to join the Undoreth and travel with the Vikings such was the level of worship on display ... — Mark Lawrence

Today the children of our public schools are taught more of the history, heroes, legends, and sagas of the old world than of the land of their birth, while they are furnished with little material on the people and institutions that are truly American. — Luther Standing Bear

I read American sagas (of the west) and I do not see people who went in search of material things. I see people who wrote down that what they sought was an escape from an old world which dictated their conscience and established their merit based on who their parents. — Alan Keyes

One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, - to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to collect sagas and heap cairns. This instinct as to the enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization. — John Jay Chapman

The very odd thing about sagas [ ... ] is that they very rarely mention dry mouths and full bladders. — David Gemmell

For some reason, people try to fill you with food when you're filled with grief. I didn't need food. I needed a reason to keep living — Priscille Sibley

How tall is it?" [The Harps]
"according to the sagas, it links through time and space and keeps our world and your world tethered together"
"Pretty big, then — Kathryn James

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it. — Lascelles Abercrombie

Family and dysfunction went together like peanut butter and jelly. Family sagas. Everything would be okay. But how? — Diana Y. Paul

Oh yes. I was telling you about my research into the old Norse sagas- the mythology of ancient Scandinavia. Have you read them?"
"Uh no."
"You'd like them, Cassie." He waved the hand with the chalk in it. "All sex and violence."
I frowned. "Why would you think that I'd- — Karen Chance

As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, "You're going to die, you know." However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity. — Thomas Ligotti

There are few things better than losing yourself in a book. And if you're lucky enough to have that adventure continue in a series, it's like chocolate ganache on the icing on the cake. — Richelle E. Goodrich

At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sunburned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It's great to be an Intrepid Voyager. — Ernest Hemingway,

There were some piled furs in the corner, but they were gross and old, and Zuzana was pretty sure that a variety of otherworldly vermin were living out rich, multigenerational sagas in them. — Laini Taylor

The exuberant exaggerations of the Irish sagas are not for the northern gods; Freyja, Thor, Loki have the robust common sense which the Vikings themselves admired hugely, — Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson

It was not hard to believe a beautiful woman capable of murder, Margret thought.As it says in the sagas, Opt er flago i fogru skinni. A witch often has fair skin. — Hannah Kent

Kvothe continued, smiling himself "I see you laugh. Very well, for simplicity's sake, let us assume I am the center of creation. In doing this, let us pass over innumerable boring stories: the rise and fall of empires, sagas of heroism, ballads of tragic love. Let us hurry forward to the only tale of any real importance." His smile broadened. "Mine. — Patrick Rothfuss

My ears become my conduit to the world. In the darkness I listen - to thrillers, to detective novels, to romances; to family sagas, potboilers and historical novels; to ghost stories and classic fiction and chick lit; to bonkbusters and history books. I listen to good books and bad books, great books and terrible books; I do not discriminate. Steadily, hour after hour, in the darkness I consume them all. — Anna Lyndsey

The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character — Roland Barthes

My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic. — Frances Hardinge

For the house of Dunraven, the ravens represented a spiritual claim to the Tower for the Celtic, especially the Welsh, people. For the English, the ravens represented the colorful savagery of their ancestors, which, however, testified to the exalted state of civilization they had since achieved. The national sagas of the Welsh and English gradually blended in tall tales told to tourists by Yeoman Warders, to eventually create a national myth. The romanticized past of Wales, predicated on survival, was fused with that of England, predicated on progress and conquest, to create a legend of Britain. — Boria Sax

I love those books like 'Gone with the Wind,' the huge, sweeping family sagas. — M.K. Hobson

A personal story of the horrors that Poles lived through during World War II. When God Looked the Other Way, above all else, explains why there is still a Poland ... One of the most remarkable World War II sagas I have ever read. It is history with a human face. — Arnold Beichman

Vengeance is a strange human motivation
it can drive a man to do things which he neither would nor could achieve without it ... and because of that it lies behind some of the greatest sagas of human literature! — H. Beam Piper

My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may - need is the word I use - to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. — Roger Ebert

If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history. — A.S. Byatt

After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Not all series books are sagas. Some are shaped more like beads on a string, separate episodes held together by a set of characters, who may or may not grow and change as the series continues. — Katharine Kerr

I ploughed the land with horses,
But my heart was ill at ease,
For the old seafaring men
Came to me now and then,
With their sagas of the seas. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I was worst to the one I loved best. — Hannah Kent