Folk Quotes

“If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.”
― Vera Nazarian

“I had no songs in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers weren't for radiophiles. There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang. They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn't come gently to the shore. I guess you could say they weren't commercial.

Not only that, my style was too erratic and hard to pigeonhole for the radio, and songs, to me, were more important that just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it "the invisible republic."

Whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. i just thought of popular culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it.

I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs taught me that.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“I really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Good Fairies of New York

“I rub a hand over my face. By the fire, a spindly, insectile faerie stirs a big pot. "You want soup, mortal? "
I shake my head.
"You want to be soup? " It asks hopefully.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“reality has too many heads”
― Bob Dylan, Lyrics, 1962-2001

“The cultured court singer of heroic lays disappears along with the heroic spirit of his public, but heroic poetry survives the heroic age and is more long-lived than the society to which it owes its origin. After the decline of the military aristocratic culture, it turns from an exclusive class interest into a universal art. The fact that this declension was so easily brought about, and that the same kind of poetry could be understood and enjoyed by the upper and lower classes almost simultaneously, can only be explained by assuming that the difference in cultural standards between the rulers and the ruled cannot have been anything like so great as in later ages. It is true that from the very beginning the rulers lived in a different sphere from the people, but they were not yet so conscious of the gulf that divided them from the lower classes.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

“I rub a hand over my face. By the fire, a spindly, insectile, faerie stirs a big pot. "You want soup, mortal? "
I shake my head.
"You want to be soup? " it asks hopefully.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“يد الدولة ممكن أن تمنع البلد من أن يهوي أكثر مما هوى، ولكن يد الشعب وحدها هي التي تستطيع أن تجعل هذا البلد يقف على قدميه وينطلق إلى الرخاء”
― مصطفى أمين, 100 فكرة وفكرة

“In the course of the history of art and literature we repeatedly meet this stylistic differentiation according to subject-matter. For example, the dual manner of characterization employed by Shakespeare, according to which his servants and clowns speak in everyday prose but his heroes and lords in elaborately artistic verse, corresponds to this ‘Egyptian’, thematically determined alternation of style. For Shakespeare’s characters do not speak the different language of the various classes as they exist in reality, like the characters in a modern drama, for instance, who are all drawn naturalistically, whether they are of high or low degree, but the members of the ruling class are portrayed in a stylized manner and express themselves in a language non-existent in real life, whereas the representatives of the common people are described realistically and speak the idiom of the street, the inns and the workshop.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

“Folks is all queer nowadays,' said the peasant-woman.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The world of science and the world of everyday experience do not always connect especially well.”
― Robin I.M. Dunbar, How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures

“There are those among the Folk so hideous that all living things shrink back in horror. And yet others have a grotesquerie so exaggerated, so voluptuous, that it comes all the way around to beauty”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“You must not hesitate," I informed her. "You must walk through like one of the Folk, who simply ignore the impossible until it ceases to be so.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands

“Discussing his ability to adopt lyrics that someone else has written and sing them with conviction and true emotion, Kotamaki stated that singing about the burden of loss, of a losing a clos person, and the difficulty o fdealing with emotional agony is a human experience, relatable to anyone....As a shared human experience, both the expression of emotions and the difficulty of dealing with the loss of a loved one can surely be considered appealing to 'folk' regardless of one's musical taste, nationality, or country of residence...”
― Mika Elovaara, Connecting Metal to Culture: Unity in Disparity

“...one of the great tasks of ecological thinking will be to develop an ecological civicism that restores the organic bonds of community without reverting to the archaic blood-tie at one extreme or the totalitarian "folk philosophy" of fascism at the other.”
― Murray Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship

“Jag vet att förändring kostar. Saker händer. Oförutsedda saker. Folk är folk, vad de än är för sort, och rädsla finns överallt.”
― Siri Pettersen, Evna

“Disrespecting elders is the cancer of folks.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“Speranza si incupì sotto lo sguardo delle nipotine, le sopracciglia bianche si incontrarono al centro della fronte e la luce aranciata dell’abat-jour marcava le rughe come trincee nere, creava ombre scure nell’incavo degli occhi e sotto il mento. «Sa Filonzana» disse. «La Filatrice» chiarì subito dopo, a beneficio delle bambine. [...] «Lei fila il destino della gente» continuò. «E lo interrompe, se deve. Zac! Taglia il filo» spiegò, mimando un paio di forbici con le dita, quasi volesse giocare a Carta-Forbici-Sasso.
«Come le Parche» osservò Elena, dall’alto dei suoi dieci anni di saggezza.”
― Letizia Loi, Sa Filonzana

“La gente tende a immaginare le fate – is janas nella sua terra, il Piccolo Popolo in altre tradizioni – come esseri minuti e graziosi. La verità è che, a dispetto del nome, sono creature di ogni razza e forma, e ben poche si rivelano gradevoli.”
― Letizia Loi, Janas

“Un genitore normale non pensa che il mostro sotto al letto sia vero. Ma loro non erano una famiglia normale. Non avevano il lusso dell’ignoranza.”
― Letizia Loi, Janas

“[...] e fu allora che Elena notò il tatuaggio sul collo: sotto l’orecchio appariva un cerchio diviso in quattro parti da due linee incrociate. Ogni quarto era riempito da righe che formavano un diverso motivo, a volte più strette, altre più larghe, ondulate o riempite da puntini. Una pintadera, il timbro con cui fin dall’età nuragica si usava marchiare il pane per portarlo al forno comune o colorarsi il corpo, per segnare l’appartenenza a una precisa famiglia. Il simbolo, diverso per ogni casa, era sopravvissuto tra i cacciatori per riconoscersi tra loro come facenti parte di un’unica gilda, pur facendo parte di ceppi differenti.”
― Letizia Loi, Brebus

“Nel mentre, Aurora cominciò a recitare un brebu, una preghiera – o forse sarebbe stato più corretto chiamarlo incantesimo – in sardo, le cui origini risalivano a ben prima dell’arrivo del cristianesimo, quando i popoli veneravano la terra e il cielo sotto il nome di una sola Dea, la Madre. I brebus potevano avere molti fini, ma questo era cantato affinché lo spirito trovasse pace.”
― Letizia Loi

“«Lei era la Dea, la Grande Madre, quando ancora non si era mai sentito parlare di un unico Dio. [...] Ma con il passare del tempo la gente ha dimenticato, ha smesso di credere. Ora non è altro che lo spettro di se stessa, frammentato in varie eco, e quando appare prende in sacrificio chiunque trovi da solo sul suo cammino.»”
― Letizia Loi, Bona Dea

“Το Καρναβάλι εισέβαλλε πανηγυρικά και μέσα στα σπίτια - άλλαζαν οι παλμοί της καρδιάς όταν άκουγες τα κουδούνια να ξηλώνουν τις σκάλες και να 'ρχονται κατά πάνω σου - και φτάνοντας στη γωνιά όπου καθόταν το γεροντότερο και γι' αυτό σεβαστότερο πρόσωπο της οικογένειας, του έδινε με χειροφίλημα ένα απ' τα πορτοκάλια του ζητώντας να συγχωρεθούν τα αμαρτήματα' ή με την γενικότερη και μονολεκτική έκφραση "συγχωρεμένα". Στην συνέχεια απ' την χαρά του θαρρείς γι' αυτό που ζήτησε και πήρε, αλλά και γι 'αυτό που πρόσφερε, έφερνε τους πανηγυρικότερους κύκλους μες στο δωμάτιο κινώντας μπρος-πίσω το σώμα του, απανωτά, με πολλή δύναμη, έτσι που το μπατάλι να ζει τις ενδοξότερες στιγμές του φτάνοντας ως ψηλά στην πλάτη, ξαναπέφτοντας στα χαμηλά και ξαναγγίζοντας τα ύψη... Για να μην ξεχνάμε κιόλας πώς όλα αυτά λειτουργούσαν και ως πρόφαση, ευγενής πρόφαση, προκειμένου να φάνε κι οι άνθρωποι τότε ένα πορτοκάλι!...”
― Ζυράννα Ζατέλη, Και με το φως του λύκου επανέρχονται

“Oppression is the character of stupid people if God wanted to punish a folk, will put them under the hands of the oppressors.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“لا يمكن أن يكون الجيش راضيا والشعب ساخطاً، مهما غمر الضباط بالإمتيازات والمرتبات”
― مصطفى أمين, سنة رابعة سجن

“My sorrow in the nights of past I left,
all the sadness from your lack, at rest,
since you’re with me, lacking, the world is aglow,
back at folk advice I throw;
if I took advice, I’d about you forget,
I’d think of another, myself loose I’d let,
yet I wouldn’t always remain just this calm,
confined in myself, I’d hold me in my palm…”
― Will Advise, На чист Български...: Pristine Bulgarian sayings...

“Asch took from his bankruptcy an important lesson: he decided that he never wanted to record another hit record. In early 1949, he commented to an unnamed writer from People’s Songs (the newsletter of left-wing folk music) that he had “focused too much time and money on popular jazz” and from this point forward he would focus on “good records,” which would be “sold to a small circle of people who will buy them.”
― Richard Carlin, Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways

“I'd met Claudette at Christmas and felt intimidated by the blank slate of her consciousness, and her proximity to the realm of nonexistence from which she had so recently emerged.”
― Kate Folk, Sky Daddy