Footnote Quotes

“Theoretical considerations require that what is to-day the object of a phobia must at one time in the past have been the source of a high degree of pleasure.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Sexual Enlightenment of Children

“Your Brain on drugs is a terrible sight, but Mr Tulip was living proof of the fact that so was Your Brain on a a cocktail of horse liniment, sherbet, and powdered water-retention pills.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Truth: Stage Adaptation

“Apparently you’re only allowed to demolish Wolverhampton if you’re a property developer like Donald Trump. Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.”
― Charles Stross, The Delirium Brief

“... a man could build whatever monuments he wanted in the worlds of politics, sports, entertainment, and business, but if they come at the expense of his children, then he has failed. Once the attention fades and the crowds stop cheering his name and his accomplishments are little more than fine print in a history book, the only thing that truly survives him is his child. That is his legacy. That is what defines him. All else is but a footnote.”
― Steve Pemberton, A CHANCE IN THE WORLD: An Orphan Boy, a Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home

“After all, as Prokhorov said, "Money nowadays comes in two stories." What Westerners could comprehend "two-story money"? A lathe operator during the war received, after deductions, eight hundred rubles a month, and bread cost 140 rubles on the open market. And that meant that in the course of one month he did not earn enough for even six kilos of bread, over and above his ration. In other words, he could not bring home even seven ounces a day for his whole family! But at the same time he did… live. With frank and open impudence they paid the workers an unreal wage, and let them go and seek "the second story." And the person who paid our plasterer [at the Kaluga Gates prison camp] insane money [200 rubles] for his evening's work also got to the "second story" on his own in some particular way. Thus it was that the socialist system triumphed, but only on paper. The old ways—tenacious, flexible—never died out, as a result of either curses or persecution by the prosecutors.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“You can't reveal to me that you're Folk---it must have been part of the enchantment that exiled you from your world. Isn't that it? I've heard of that---yes, that account of the Gallic changeling. And isn't it a peripheral motif within the Ulster Cycle?*

* There are, in fact, several stories from France and the British Isles which describe this sort of enchantment. In two of the Irish tales, which may have the same root story, a mortal maiden figures out that her suitor is an exile of the courtly fae after he inadvertently touches her crucifix and burns himself (the Folk in Irish stories are often burning themselves on crucifixes, for some reason). She announces it aloud, which breaks the enchantment and allows him henceforth to reveal his faerie nature to whomever he chooses.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

“All dryadologists accept the existence of those doors that lead to individual faerie homes and villages, such as those inhabited by the common fae. Theories about a second class of door are more controversial, but I myself believe highly credible, given the stories we have of the courtly fae. These are thought to be doors that lead deep into Faerie, into a world wholly separate from our own.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

“Below us was a frozen lake. It was perfectly round, a great gleaming eye in which the moon and stars were mirrored. Lanterns glowing the same cold white as the aurora dangled from the lake's edge to a scattering of benches and merchant-stands, draped in bright awnings of opal and blue. Delicious smells floated on the wind---smoked fish; fire-roasted nuts and candies; spiced cakes. A winter fair.*


* Outside of Russia, almost all known species of courtly fae, and many common fae also, are fond of fairs and markets; indeed, such gatherings appear in stories as the interstitial spaces between their worlds and ours, and thus it is not particularly surprising that they feature in so many encounters with the Folk. The character of such markets, however, varies widely, from sinister to benign. The following features are universal: 1) Dancing, which the mortal visitor may be invited to partake in; 2) A variety of vendors selling foods and goods which the visitor is unable to recall afterwards. More often than not, the markets take place at night. Numerous scholars have attempted to document these gatherings; the most widely referenced accounts are by Baltasar Lenz, who successfully visited two fairs in Bavaria before his disappearance in 1899.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

“The Cubs are a major league baseball team based in Chicago. Apparently, the team was once cursed by a goat and is doomed now to never win the World Series. The 71 seats [auctioned by the Chicago Board of Exchange] are adjacent to the Cubs' dugout on the third-base line. This is an unnecessary detail needed to give color to what would otherwise be a dull and uninspiring narrative.”
― Rakesh V. Vohra, Principles of Pricing: An Analytical Approach

“Can you imagine a Jane Austen heroine declining an invitation to dance because she's having her period? Can you imagine how much saner our society would be if she had?”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Some have suggested that the preponderance of trickster stories in folklore ranging from the Norse Loki to the Coyote of the New World may have in their origins stories of bargains gone awry, though the opposite may be as likely to be true--- that stories of human pride's comeuppance are a commonplace theme.
---Changelings and Gambler's Chances: Tales of Fairy Mischief,
by William Fitzgerald”
― Rowenna Miller, The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill

“Despite objections by Evans (1901), Blanchet (1904), and others, "faun" remains the accepted nomenclature for all species of hoofed common fae regardless of size or origin, one of several terms whose lineage can be traced to dryadology's roots in early-seventeenth-century Greece.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands

“She is sending assassins after you because she thinks we are engaged, and thus her mad faerie logic tells her that I will devote my life to seeking revenge against her if she murders you."
"That's generally how these things go. You know the stories."
Of course I did. Deirde and the River Lord; The Princess of Shell Halls.*

*Deirde was an Irish queen who sent her army into Faerie to avenge the death of her faerie husband at the hands of his brothers. The Princess of Shell Halls is likely of French origin, a variant of La princesse et le trône de sel. "Sel," meaning salt, was likely mistranslated as "shell," but the framework of the story is the same: a faerie princess of an undersea kingdom dedicates her life to avenging the death of her betrothed, the prince of an island realm. This despite the fact that leaving the sea condemns her to a slow death, to which she eventually succumbs only after murdering the last of the conspirators in her fiancé's murder.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands

“Neither of us was hungry, but we managed to force down a little of Poe's bread, which was, as ever, delicious, buttery with a hint of chocolate, and very refreshing. Having finished the water we had brought with us, we were now forced to drink from creeks and streams. I was not happy about this, but there was no alternative.*

*In some stories, drinking from faerie streams has the same effect upon mortals as faerie wine.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands

“It was barely spring in the southern hemisphere, and Buenos Aires was not yet soft, or sumptuous, or purple.*

*I wasn't sure what this meant at first, but when I asked this author to explain it, she sent me a picture of a city that resembled a cross between Little Rock and Paris awash in jacaranda blooms”
― Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

“The protagonist of Grey Eminence was Amália, the world's first climate change artist* and the first person to exceed a billion followers on Instagram, making her a sort of global empress, unprecedented in the history of Earth. She was also Portugal's foremost performer of fado, a gold medalist in rhythmic gymnastics, excellent at baking, and capable of taming the aurochs she summoned back from extinction to revivify Lascaux.

*What the author means here is that Amália was the first to view climate change itself as an art. Her oeuvre was above all a radical reinterpretation of the still life. She practiced extinction as well as large-scale action sculptures that undid or outmaneuvered natural processes such as decomposition and promoted catastrophes when opportunities--- weather-related or other--- arose.”
― Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

“The lie is that our circumstances will always loom larger than any solution to those circumstances, and therefore our situation is (and will always be) our forever story. But God says that our circumstances will never be anything other than a fleeting footnote because He is our forever story.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I remembered what Callum had said about Queen Arna--- that she had taken the poison within herself and somehow infected the realm with it, as a mortal might pass on a cold. It was a mad idea, of course, and yet simultaneously--- as is often the case in Faerie--- there was a sort of logic to it. Monarchs of Faerie do not merely inhabit their realms; they are thought to be intricately entwined.*

*Wentworth Morrison's Folk-Lore of Scotland, Volume III: Thrones of Faerie (1852) remains the definitive resource on this topic, but Farris Rose's exhaustive investigation of Cornish faerie stories (in particular his Atlas of Tales, 1900) provides additional insight. Cornwall holds the record for the sheer number of interactions between mortals and monarchs of Faerie (Rose's "Comparative Analysis of the Faerie Markets of Bodmin Moor," published in Dryadological Fieldnotes in 1902, offers several intriguing theories as to why this might be so). In many of the tales recorded by Morrison and Rose, a faerie monarch's power is also their Achilles' heel: while they control the landscape and weather, they can be defeated by being trapped and removed from their homes, as a flower dies when uprooted from its soil.

It was both a threat to Wendell's rule and the perfect revenge against him. He who had evaded the same poison was now forced to watch it consume his realm.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales

“The Winter Gardener" is a similar tale, with the titular gardener replacing the shoemaker, but in this story, the gardener is merely a mortal woman who does not possess a secret identity. After the queen sacrifices herself to save her realm, the gardener plants a snowdrop over her grave, which grows as large as a tree and scatters its seeds across the realm; the tale is often used as an explanation for the perceived advantages of Irish snowdrops over those of other countries.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales