Bards Quotes

“I'd rather you wanted to make love,' said Dernhil, smiling crookedly. 'That was my first thought, when you barged in here. I could easily refuse that.'
'It's a much lesser question,' said Cadvan gravely. Then he gave Dernhil a sharp look. 'Would you really refuse me?'
'Probably.' Dernhil's eyes brimmed with sudden laughter. 'Honestly, Cadvan, have you no grace? What a thing to ask!'
Cadvan's rare smile leapt in his face. 'It occurs to me that I might love you well enough.'
Dernhil looked briefly astonished. 'And to think that all these years I thought you hated me!' he said lightly.
'You know I don't hate you,' said Cadvan. 'I think you know I never did. Nor you me. And you, maybe more than anyone else I know, understands that there are many kinds of love.' He gestured impatiently. 'That's not what I'm asking, anyway.'
'I know.' Dernhil met his gaze darkly. 'Only you would demand such a thing, in the middle of the night, from me, of all people!'
'Yes,' said Cadvan, a soft mockery in his voice. 'From you, of all people!'
Dernhil looked down at his hands and was silent for a time, thinking. Cadvan waited patiently, watching him. When Dernhil looked up, his face was open, and a smile lurked in the back of his eyes.
'Perhaps I love you enough to scry you, Cadvan,' he said. 'And that is a great deal more than you deserve.' p.146”
― Alison Croggon, The Bone Queen

“Maybe the Bards function, and the function of story in general, is to constantly recreate us by re-observing us. The storyteller holds up a mirror to us, and he or she has great power to show us in a flattering or insulting manner. As we re-observe ourselves (and the author believes we are frequently distorting the image we have of ourselves) through the nightly news, advertising media (magazines, billboards, advertisements, and so forth), television, and film, we are the consciousness that collapses the wave function and recreates ourselves.”
― Laurence Galian, 666: Connection with Crowley

“Do you not want to rule the world, Nicator Seleucus? Do you not want your name whispered from Athens to the banks of the Indus? Hear the bards singing your fame for posterity and the cities minting your coins? The armies carrying your banners and the warriors piercing the clouds with your name? Do you not want all of that, Seleucus?”
― Moris Farhi, Doctor Who: Farewell, Great Macedon

“It was what the gleeman had called Plain Chant, those nights beside the fire on the ride north. Stories, he said, were told in three voices, High Chant, Plain Chant, and Common, which meant simply telling it the way you might tell your neighbor about your crop. Thom told stories in Common, but he did not bother to hide his contempt for the voice.”
― Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World

“Let you sing of us all by name, that we may live as long as the song."
"All three hundred of you?" Aneirin said, with his eyebrows quirking. "By name, aye and by reputation.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shining Company

“These great Nordic incursions were to result in the marginalization of the once semi-autonomous Pictish, English and North British Princedoms that had preceded the arrival of the Norsemen on British soil. And, as they disappeared beneath the onslaught of the Viking Hosts, the ancient bardic traditions, which had once been succoured by these previously distinct ethnic groups, gradually became intertwined with one another as a result of widespread migration, inter-marriage and cross fertilization; the ultimate legacy of which was the perpetuation of the fragmentary remains of the ancient traditions which were to come to adorn the ballads that the Laird of Abbotsford himself collected, amongst the eighteenth century descendants of these ancient peoples.”
― Rupert Ferguson, The Lay of the Last Minstrel: Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrel Tradition