Top 1200 Old Wives Tales Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

It was the duty of wives to submit to husbands, not of husbands to submit to wives. . . men have stronger muscles than women.

I love the stories of changelings and the thought that the Fey were these ancient, capricious creatures who were tricky and dangerous. I've always preferred the Brothers Grimm faery tales to the Disney fairy tales.

We broke through the feminine mystique and women who were wives, mothers and housewives began to find themselves as people. That didn't mean they stopped, or had to stop, being mothers, wives or even liking their homes.

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.

Such indeed is the superior longevity of the fair females of Surinam, compared to that of the males (owing chiefly, as I said, to their excesses of all sorts) that I have frequently known wives who have buried four husbands, but never met a man in this country who had survived two wives.

You're in a terrible spot. It's too late for you to retreat but too soon to act. All you can do is witness. You're in the miserable position of an infant who cannot return to the mother's womb, but neither can he run around and act. All an infant can do is witness and listen to the stupendous tales of action being told to him. You are at that precise point now. You cannot go back to the womb of your old world, but you cannot act with power either. For you there is only witnessing acts of power and listening to tales of power.

But do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.

Parents and children cannot be to each other, as husbands with wives and wives with husbands. Nature has separated them by an almost impassable barrier of time; the mind and the heart are in quite a different state at fifteen and forty.

I did translations of Grimms' Fairy Tales and became very charmed about that way of looking at things. Fairy tales tell a lot of truths. Just as a side point, for instance, we always think the bad guys in fairy tales are the stepmothers, who are witches. But where are the fathers when the witches are killing and mishandling their children? Away. They are on a business trip. They are hunting, they are away. Wow, you know! No one says the fathers are the bad guys! It's one of the things you don't say. But my goodness, where are they?

Brother Cannon remarked that people wondered how many wives and children I had. He may inform them that I shall have wives and children by the million, and glory, and riches, and power, and dominion, and kingdom after kingdom, and reign triumphantly

And why do so many people wilfully exhaust their strength in promiscuous living, when their wives are on hand from bridal night till old age - to be taken when required, like fish from a private pond.

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

The words 'fairy tales' must accordingly be taken to include tales in which occurs something 'fairy,' something extraordinary - fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals.

I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.

I wanted the chance to look again at very famous stories and see what made them work well, whether there were any ways in which they could be improved. Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.

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

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.

For who can wonder that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits wandering through those places which they once dearly affected, when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than they, is for ever lingering upon past emotions and bygone times, and hovering, the ghost of his former self, about the places and people that warmed his heart of old?

There are 146 countries above us where the men have longer lifespans, and the biggest blow is that even with four wives who don't fast for them, the Arab men outlive our good old Indian dudes.

The children know all about everything so well that it never occurs to them to play at the situations in any one of these tales, or even to read it twice over. But let them have tales of the imagination, scenes laid in other lands and other times, heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy tales in which they are never roughly pulled up by the impossible —even where all is impossible, and they know it, and yet believe.

Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text. It's not like the text of Paradise Lost or James Joyce's Ulysses, and you have to adhere to that exact text.

I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good.

I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.

I love fairy tales because I think that behind fairy tales, there is always a meaning.

The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.

I find inspiration from a lot of different texts and really old stories and folk tales - things I feel like no one else is reading.

You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.

Wives, girlfriends, fiancees - clean out your closets. I'm cleaning out my old bell bottoms. We can touch millions.

One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.

I beg of you, you who could and should be bearing and rearing a family: Wives, come home from the typewriter, the laundry, the nursing, come home from the factory, the cafe. No career approaches in importance that of wife, homemaker, mother -- cooking meals, washing dishes, making beds for one's precious husband and children. Come home, wives, to your husbands. Make home a heaven for them. Come home, wives, to your children, born and unborn. Wrap the motherly cloak about you and, unembarrassed, help in a major role to create the bodies for the immortal souls who anxiously await.

Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes.

White men have always controlled their wives' wages. Colored men were not able to do so until they themselves became free. Then they owned both their wives and their wages.

Fantasy is, I believe, the great nourisher of imagination. To paraphrase Einstein on how to develop intelligence in young people: Read fairy tales. Then read more fairy tales.

Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives; And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives.

The language of the novel differs from the just-the-facts language of the old tales. It's robust and earthy, sometimes even baroque.

Do you believe in fairy tales?" "What...what kind of fairy tales?" "The kind you aren't supposed to waste your life on.

I'm used to writing fairy tales that can be somewhat dark, and the truth is that in fairy tales, romances are always problematic. They may end happily ever after, but someone's getting pushed into an oven or has blood in her shoe.

I call my backup singers my sister wives. To me, they are my best friends. We are all super close. It's kind of like the closest relationship you can have without being blood related, to me. It's a joke that they're sister wives - obviously, we're not polygamists.

What I like about fairy tales is the language and the matter-of-fact way of introducing magic, where it's accepted that a fox could talk or a gate could just appear in a wall. I think fairy tales are so psychological.

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.

Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. . . .

In music, on stage and on screen, fairy tales have always been guaranteed moneymakers. It's no wonder then, that in these difficult economic times, there are fairy tales everywhere you turn. From 'Once Upon a Time' and 'Grimm,' to 'Mirror, Mirror' and 'Snow White and the Huntsman.'

A survey released today found that men spend twice as much on their mistresses for Christmas as they do on their wives. On the other hand, men spend half their income on the wives when the wife finds out about the mistress. So it all balances out.

Every kid loves fairy tales, stories of witches and giants and magicians. Then, when you get a little older you can't read fairy tales anymore.

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

Most of the leading figures of the Old Testament were polygamists. Abraham had several wives and concubines. If they wanted, they could say this was approved in the Bible.

People who are so dreadfully "devoted" to their wives are so apt, from mere habit, to get devoted to other people's wives as well.

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.

Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales-because they find them romantic.

The old fairy tales are very, very violent, and these days I think we could do with a little less of it.

Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.

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.

The gossip mill on tour is always turning. I have to be a little careful about what I tell guys who I don't consider close friends, because even though they might not spread it to other players, they'll usually tell their wives. And once the wives get it, it's gone.

The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrowminded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales’ concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner process taking place in an individual.

Husbands, be patient with your wives; and wives, be patient with your husbands. Don't expect perfection. Find agreeable ways to work out the differences that arise.

Fairy tales are my natural language. I feel at ease telling fairy tales like a fish feels in water. I am totally free.

The facts are men, women, children, gay, lesbian, transgender, old, young, wives, husbands, black, white are all affected... the face of domestic violence has no one identity.

The kid in the episode [of Tales From The Darkside ] was played by Christian Slater! He was all of about 12 or so, but I've run into Christian many times since then, and he always does his line from Tales From The Darkside whenever he sees me.

I adopted a healthier diet. I take at least a tablespoon of apple-cider vinegar a day. It's an old wives' tale, but it really is one of the best things you can put in your mouth.

John Walker, while he was in Afghanistan, told people his goal was to have four wives. ... Do we need any further proof that this guy is out of his mind? Four wives? That's how al Qaeda gets you to become a suicide bomber.