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Irish Fairy and Folk Tales QUOTES

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales QUOTES

1 " Round these men stories tended to group themselves, sometimes deserting more ancient heroes for the purpose. Round poets have they gathered especially, for poetry in Ireland has always been mysteriously connected with magic. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

2 " On November Eve they are at their gloomiest, for according to the old Gaelic reckoning, this is the first night of winter. This night they dance with the ghosts, and the pooka is abroad, and witches make their spells, and girls set a table with food in the name of the devil, that the fetch of their future lover may come through the window and eat of the food. After November Eve the blackberries are no longer wholesome, for the pooka has spoiled them. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

3 " Come away, O, human child!
To the woods and waters wild,
With a fairy hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

4 " it's a long lane that has no turning. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

5 " every one is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without scratching. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

6 " Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepra-caun—the shoemaker. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

7 " I don't think the moral is good; and if any of you thuckeens go about imitating Anty in her laziness, you'll find it won't thrive with you as it did with her. She was beautiful beyond compare, which none of you are, and she had three powerful fairies to help her besides. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

8 " That ancient chronicler Giraldus taunted the Archbishop of Cashel because no one in Ireland had received the crown of martyrdom. "Our people may be barbarous," the prelate answered, "but they have never lifted their hands against God's saints; but now that a people have come amongst us who know how to make them (it was just after the English invasion), we shall have martyrs plentifully. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

9 " With us nothing has time to gather meaning, and too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

10 " On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires are lighted on every hill in honour of St. John, the fairies are at their gayest, and sometime steal away beautiful mortals to be their brides. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

11 " Each county has usually some family, or personage, supposed to have been favoured or plagued, especially by the phantoms, as the Hackets of Castle Hacket, Galway, who had for their ancestor a fairy, or John-o'-Daly of Lisadell, Sligo, who wrote "Eilleen Aroon, "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

12 " allegories "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

13 " these allegories are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has to invent them; much labour and ingenuity will be required of him; and when he has once begun, he must go on and rehabilitate centaurs and chimeras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless other inconceivable and portentous monsters. And if he is sceptical about them, and would fain reduce them one after another to the rules of probability, this sort of crude philosophy will take up all his time. Now, I have certainly not time for such inquiries. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

14 " pensive. "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

15 " The Irish word for fairy is sheehogue [sidheóg], a diminutive of “shee” in banshee. Fairies are deenee shee [daoine sidhe] (fairy people). "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

16 " pooka "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

17 " Keen "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

18 " crabtree "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

19 " dapper "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

20 " monomaniac "

― W.B. Yeats , Irish Fairy and Folk Tales