Folk Lore Quotes

“There are a number of good books that draw upon fox legends -- foremost among them, Kij Johnson's exquisite novel The Fox Woman. I also recommend Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters (with the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano);  Larissa Lai's unusual novel, When Fox Is a Thousand; Helen Oyeyemi's recent novel, Mr. Fox; and Ellen Steiber's gorgeous urban fantasy novel, A Rumor of Gems, as well as her heart-breaking novella "The Fox Wife" (published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears). For younger readers, try the "Legend of Little Fur" series by Isobelle Carmody.  You can also support a fine mythic writer by subscribing to Sylvia Linsteadt's The Gray Fox Epistles: Wild Tales By Mail. 

For the fox in myth, legend, and lore, try: Fox by Martin Wallen; Reynard the Fox, edited by Kenneth Varty; Kitsune: Japan's Fox of Mystery, Romance, and Humour by Kiyoshi Nozaki;Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative by Raina Huntington; The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling by Leo Tak-hung Chan; and The Fox and the Jewel: Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship, by Karen Smythers.”
― Terri Windling

“Trickster foxes appear in old stories gathered from countries and cultures all over the world -- including Aesop's Fables from ancient Greece, the "Reynard" stories of medieval Europe, the "Giovannuzza" tales of Italy, the "Brer Fox" lore of the American South, and stories from diverse Native American traditions.”
― Terri Windling

“You know why I really hated you? With all that you had you were just so oblivious to it all. You didn't use your beauty. You didn't ever try to get what you wanted. You didn't deserve what you had. I did because I would have used it. And you just...loved me. Loved me no matter what I did. You have no idea how I despised you for that. I wanted you gone."

'The Yielding”
― J.A. Ironside, A Chimerical World: Tales of the Unseelie Court

“The big knight fell heavily to the ground, and lay there, as nearly dead as possible. His servants came running from the castle and took him in. He got better in the end, but nobody cared much about that.”
― Roger Lancelyn Green, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table

“There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says, "You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me!" And the man is taken after all. Arthur Less has traveled halfway around the world in a cat's cradle of junkets, changing flights and fleeing from a sandstorm into into the Atlas Mountains like someone erasing his trail or outfoxing a hunter—and yet Time has been waiting here all along. In a snowy alpine resort. With cuckoos. Of course Time would turn out to be Swiss. He tosses back the champagne. He thinks: Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“Nowadays anthropology is busy with the gathering of chips of stones and of long-forgotten and buried remnants, in order to reconstruct the history of human, physical and social development. Much more important than those remote periods and than the material world, is the history of our intellectual development, to gather all the chips of the human genius, scattered and buried under the ruins of old literatures, and hidden in the popular literature. The youth of the human mind and the poetical reflection of the surrounding world are embodied in these tales and legends.”
― Moses Gaster, Jewish Folk-Lore In The Middle Ages