Some Legendary Quotes & Sayings

Sara Kendell once read somewhere that the tale of the world is like a tree. The tale, she understood, did not so much mean the niggling occurrences of daily life. Rather it encompassed the grand stories that caused some change in the world and were remembered in ensuing years as, if not histories, at least folktales and myths. By such reasoning, Winston Churchill could take his place in British folklore alongside the legendary Robin Hood; Merlin Ambrosius had as much validity as Martin Luther. The scope of their influence might differ, but they were all a part of the same tale. — Charles De Lint

There was some kind of X-men emergency, so all the teachers were gone. This happens every now and then. It's one of the perks of having super heroes for your teachers - when the world is about to end (which is like at least twice a month), school gets canceled. Heck, three weeks ago there was a big chemistry final for the upperclassmen. Beast was the teacher - he's this big, burly guy who can do acrobatic stuff like a monkey, but he also happens to be a super-genius. He's, like, legendary for his tough finals, so there were kids walking through the halls, going, Oh, God, please let Galactus try to eat the earth. Please please please let there be an alien invasion by the Skrulls! — Barry Lyga

Bad sex is a fuckin' myth, like a goddamned legendary creature in some fuckin' sappy fairytale. — Jenn Cooksey

I had seen some shows at the Groundlings [legendary L.A. improvisational and sketch comedy troupe] and thought, "If I could ever do that, that would really mean something, that I have arrived." So I went through the program and said to myself, "I'm going to stay here until they kick me out." Seriously, they can ask you to leave at any point. Luckily, they never did that to me. — Wendi McLendon-Covey

It actually did remind him of a spider, in fact. One particular genus that had become legendary among invertebrate zoologists and computational physicists alike: a problem-solver that improvised and drew up plans far beyond anything that should have been able to fit into such a pinheaded pair of ganglia. Portia. The eight-legged cat, some had called it. The spider that thought like a mammal. — Peter Watts

NBC's pilot season of 1994 is legendary in the business. In a world where failure is commonplace, we midwifed the birth of both 'Friends' and 'ER'. While 'ER' came essentially out of the blue, we'd been casting around for a 'Friends'-like show for some time at the network. — Warren Littlefield

I've always made some legendary comebacks since 1998 when it first started. So that's kind of just been my MO for my whole career. — Serena Williams

The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age ... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text. — Arthur Koestler

Now in these subterranean caverns lived a strange race of beings, called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins. There was a legend current in the country that at one time they lived above ground, and were very like other people. But for some reason or other, concerning which there were different legendary theories, the king had laid what they thought too severe taxes upon them, or had required observances of them they did not like, or had begun to treat them with more severity, in some way or other, and impose stricter laws; and the consequence was that they had all disappeared from the face of the country. According to the legend, however, instead of going to some other country, they had all taken refuge in the subterranean caverns, whence they never came out but at night, and then seldom showed themselves in any numbers, and never to many people at once. — George MacDonald

Gary Moore is another legendary figure of sheer violence. In prison, Gary has spent most of his adult life inside one jail or another. When, on the odd occasion, he does get out of prison, it doesn't take him long to go on a murderous campaign of total terror. Gary has been charged and stood trial for some three or four different murders. — Stephen Richards

In 869 we have an event which rapidly achieved almost mythic status in English Christian folklore: the horrible martyrdom of King Edmund of East Anglia by the appalling Ivar the Boneless, who according to some traditions brought a great Viking army to England in pursuit of revenge for the killing of his father, the semi-legendary Ragnar Lothbrok, executed by the king of Northumbria. — Heather O'Donoghue

Big Rab has worked in Barlinnie's Wendy House for over seven and a half years. The average time a screw works in the seg blocks is two years, this man has seen it and done it all. Most prisoners will agree, he isn't a dog either but can be when he wants. He has had legendary roll abouts with some of Scotland's hardest criminals but at the end of it he doesn't hold any grudges. — Stephen Richards

What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees. — Ben Aaronovitch

This Classic Rock 'n Blues Tour / Hippiefest roster promises a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see some of the best, legendary artists of our lifetime. I can't wait to be a part of it. — Rick Derringer

I looked for it but I found no way out of this wild logical thicket. This was a tangle every bit as unknown and terrifying as that behind the Green Wall These were creatures just as extraordinary and incomprehensible, and they said as much with no words. I imagined that I saw through some kind of thick class the square root of minus one-infinitely huge and at the same time infinitely small, scorpion-shaped, with that hidden but always sensed sting of the minus sign... But maybe that is nothing except my "soul," like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, which would deliberately sting itself with everything that... — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These — Kim Stanley Robinson

The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim's breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new "gadget," as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb - a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki - brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated. — Algis Valiunas

Does it take a blanket presupposition for a historian to discount some miracle stories as legendary? No, because, as even Bultmann recognized, there is no problem accepting reports even of extraordinary things that we can still verify as occurring today, like faith healings and exorcisms. However you may wish to account for them, you can go to certain meetings and see scenes somewhat resembling those in the gospels. So it is by no means a matter of rejecting all miracle stories on principle. Biblical critics are not like the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. — Robert M. Price

But I guess it found you"
"About that," Peter said trying to ignore the slight. "Why send a riddle? You could have saved us a lot of trouble if you'd written something less complicated."
"It wasn't that complicated," she muttered.
"Yeah!" Scrape added. "And how was she suppose to know it'd end up in the hands of some blind dummy and his ugly pet?"
sir tode, who up to this point had been listening quietly, had evidently had enough. "I've had enough," he said, leaping to his hooves. "I'm a fierce knight, known to the world over slaying dragons. Who among you can boast such a feat? And this 'blind dummy' just happens to be the legendary Peter Nimble ... the greatest theif who ever lived. — Jonathan Auxier

Some dream with the open eyes, while some dream with the close eyes.

Some of us even don't have eyes, they dream with the legendary perspective to enlighten the whole world and become one.

"Touch the light of the universe, you would never sleep again in your fantasy dreams. — Deepak Gupta

Oh, there are no living poets, Miss Van Damn. We're not entirely sure there ever were. They've found some shreds of sonnets in England and, embedded in a chalk wall of a cave in France, some yet undetermined thing which might be the legendary inward eye. But all evidence, such as it is, suggests that, if there ever were poets, they were all burned into extinction during the interglacial period of despair. — Paddy Chayefsky

I definitely was always expected and encouraged to be a songwriter from a very young age, ... But really it's because, as a child, I thought I was Judy Garland. And when I started out, I was a little nuts. I thought I was a classic, legendary superstar when only 10 people knew who I was. I feel in some ways that my confidence is misinterpreted as arrogance, which is understandable. But I've also always thought that false modesty is evil. — Rufus Wainwright

[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body. — Terence McKenna

You've got to understand one of the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey without noticing it. In the village or suburb outside there's an inn with the sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I went about telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry, from a vague feeling that it's probable because it's prosaic. It turns something romantic and legendary into something recent and ordinary. And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it is unsupported by reason. Of course some people would have the sense to remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and French romances, but a good many wouldn't think about it at all. They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority. That's exactly what has happened here. — G.K. Chesterton

Why are some of us, he wondered, unable to love success or power or great beauty? Because we feel unworthy of them, because we feel more at home with failure? He didn't believe that was the reason. Perhaps one wanted the right balance, just as Christ had, the legendary figure whom he would have liked to believe in. 'Come unto me all ye that travail are and heavy laden.' Young as the girl was at that August picnic she was heavily laden with her timidity and shame. Perhaps he had merely wanted her to feel that she was loved by someone and so he began to love her himself. It wasn't pity, any more than it had been pity when he fell in love with Sarah pregnant by another man. He was there to right the balance. That was all. — Graham Greene

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities - a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity - but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies. — Steven Johnson

I feel like women are frequently seen as guests in the comedy world - you know, a kid sister of the "real comedians". I like the idea of positioning myself as legendary rather than trying to fit in. Now do I see myself like that every day? No, but I think it's a funny attitude and maybe on some weird, spiritual level, maybe it's a good attitude. — Chelsea Peretti

They were flying back from a big show in London, the whole roster on the plane. The story goes that much alcohol was consumed and things quickly got uncomfortable: Hennig and Scott Hall went wild with some shaving cream; Dustin Rhodes awkwardly serenaded his ex-wife, Terri; the legendary wrestler turned booker Michael "P.S." Hayes got punched out by JBL and later, after he had fallen asleep, had his ponytail chopped off by Sean Waltman; Ric Flair paraded in front of a flight attendant in nothing but his sequined ring robe; and, to top it all off, Hennig challenged collegiate wrestling star (and WWE golden boy) Brock Lesnar to a Greco-Roman wrestling match that ended when Lesnar tackled Hennig into the exit door, and they were pulled apart just before they jeopardized the flight. — David Shoemaker

I became very close with Charles Bronson and his wife, Kim. We did 'Sea Wolf' together along with Christopher Reeve. I've been lucky enough to work with some amazing, legendary actors. I worked with Rod Steiger twice, for instance. — Catherine Mary Stewart

Everything wonderful in appearance has been ascribed to angels, to devils, or to saints. Everything ancient has some legendary tale annexed to it. The common operations of nature have not escaped their practice of corrupting everything. — Thomas Paine

A critic may reject some miracle stories as legendary, and not others, with no inconsistency at all for the simple reason that even if one holds miracles to be possible, one need not hold legends to be impossible! There are other factors, literary and historiographical ones, that might lead a critic to conclude that even though miracles can happen, it does not appear that in this or that case they did. — Robert M. Price