Tale Quotes - 2
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Soon as the evening shades prevail, the moon takes up the wondrous tale. And nightly to the listening earth repeats the story of her birth.
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More Tale Quotes
I tell the tale that I heard told. Mithridates, he died old.
— 1896 A Shropshire Lad, no.62.
But there's a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that isgone: The pansyat my feet Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
william wordsworth— c.1802-1803 'Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood', stanza 4 (published1807).
Voltaire's philosophical tale "Micromégas" is also considered a "classic of early science fiction." It's very well known and easily accessible, and it's easy to read in the original. But in comparison to Cyrano's novel, it is tame.
cyrano de bergerac— Donald Webb in "The Time Traveler from The Other World" (2003).
Thus man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.
washington irving— "Westminster Abbey".
She was devastatingly cruel about our home town and told an elaborate, embossed tale about how she made good her escape. She referred to it as 'The Planet Brisbane' and ridiculed its unpleasant combination of smug self-satisfaction and provincial defensiveness.
susan johnson— Page 46. (Hungry Ghosts (1996))
No nineteenth-century writer could have written this nineteenth-century tale; but few twentieth-century writers could have handled its simplicities in the way this one does.
giuseppe tomasi di lampedusa— Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 3, p. 30.
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart.
salman rushdie— The Hindu (26 February 1995)
Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.
Robert Falcon Scott— Journal, 29 March 1912; final words, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition (1913) vol.1, ch.20
O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in everything.
william wordsworth— Simon Lee, st. 9 (1798).
"What is good for a bootless bene?" With these dark words begins my tale; And their meaning is, Whence can comfort spring When prayer is of no avail?
william wordsworth— Force of Prayer.
Are we not bold to bid a god repent; To break upon his slumbers with our prayers; To watch him day and night; to wear him out With endless supplication? Perhaps to beg His kind attention to a pleasant tale; To cheat him into pity, and conclude Each story with Prometheus?
hartley coleridge— Sylphs. (Prometheus)
To know, to esteem, to love, and then to part, Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge— On taking Leave of ———— (1817).
In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless.
stephen jay gould— "The Tallest Tale", p. 314
“Contrary to what many may think, immortality is not a fairy tale invented to compensate for an unhappy life.”
stephen r. lawhead— p. 216 (The Bone House (2011))
If I could read your mind love What a tale your thoughts could tell Just like a paperback novel just like the kind a drug store would sell When you reach the part where the heart aches come the hero would be me But heroes often fail And you won't read that book again because the endings just too hard to take..
gordon lightfoot— If You Could Read My Mind, Track 8, Reprise
Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognise them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.
Rainer Maria Rilke— Letter to his wife, reprinted in Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne (1952, trans. 1985). (October 21, 1907)
I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as 'twas said to me.
walter scott— Canto II, stanza 22.
We owe to an eighteenth century Persian poet the marvelous concept of "serendipity." It is a word born in the delightful Persian tale entitled "The Three Princes of Serendip." Webster's Dictionary defines "serendipity" as the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable things not sought for." It represense a tye of "accidental sagacity; the faculty of making fortunate discoveries of things you were not looking for."
— James J. Lynch, in ?A Cry Unheard: New Insights Into The Medical Consequences Of Loneliness? (2000), p. 198
Ye jung hai jung-e-azadi, azadi ke parcham ke tale.. It is a war , the war of independence , of the myriad souls .....
— This marching song penned by Hyderabad's poet, Maqdoom Mohiuddin, inspired many a young lover of freedom to take a plunge into the struggle for the liberation of Hyderabad State, quoted by K.Venkateshwarlu, in Momentous day for lovers of freedom, democracy (17 September 2004)
Who gather round, and wonder at the tale Of horrid apparition, tall and ghastly, That walks at dead of night, or takes his stand O'er some new-open'd grave; and, (strange to tell!) Evanishes at crowing of the cock.
robert blair— Robert Blair, The Grave, line 67.
... the wreck of the Batavia provides the greatest dramatic tragedy in Australian history, beside which the Mutiny on the Bounty is an anaemic tale.
— Thomas Davies Mutch, in a private letter to Henrietta Drake-Brockman, 1947. Published in the Foreword to Drake-Brockman's 1963 Voyage to Discovery.
I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as 'twas said to me.
walter scott— Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Canto II, Stanza 22.
This epic of evolution covers far more than the story of the evolution of biological life. It is the evolving tale of the creativity, complexity and emergence of new and novel phenomena that comprises all that is today
— Epic of Evolution Information [5]
The bard whom pilfer'd pastorals renown, Who turns a Persian tale for half a crown, Just writes to make his barrenness appear, And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a year.
Alexander Pope— Alexander Pope, Prologue to Satires, line 179
Tell my tale to those who ask it. Tell it truly - the ill deeds along with the good - and let me be judged accordingly. The rest... is silence...
— Who: Dinobot, "Code of Hero"
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.
— Jaques, Sc. vii
Mark now, how a plain tale shall put you down.
— Prince Henry, scene iv
Their great souls went on a wind away, And they have not tale or tomb; And Alfred born in Wantage Rules England till the doom. Because in the forest of all fears Like a strange fresh gust from sea , Struck him that ancient innocence That is more than mastery.
— G. K. Chesterton, in The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), Book VII : Ethandune: The Last Charge
He was the great prose satirist of the Elizabethan period and may rightly be considered as the forerunner of that much greater satirist whose tale of a Tub was a brilliant attack upon all forms of religious controversy.
martin marprelate— Sir Adolphus William Ward and Alfred Rayney Waller (eds.) The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-21), vol. 3, ch. 17, sect. 16. [1]
tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta, Quale sopor fessis.
Alexander Pope— Cf. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book I, line 93:
"Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep."
