““But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on - and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end””
J.R.R. Tolkien
“ Some .. see things that are ... and ask why ? I Dream things that never were ... and ask Why Not ! ”
G.B. Shaw
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
C.S. Lewis
“Of all the tall tales, I think my favorite is the one about Eli Whitney and the interchangeable parts.”
Jack Handy
“There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.”
Thomas Hardy
“I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.”
Isak Dinesen