Tales that have the rime of age. [ Longfellow ]
Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams. [ Coleridge ]
I have no urns, no dusty monuments;
No broken images of ancestors,
Wanting an ear, or nose; no forged tales
Of long descents, to boast false honors from. [ Ben Jonson ]
Tales of Robin Hood are good enough for fools. [ Proverb ]
Of all tales, it is the saddest - and more sad,
Because it makes us smile. [ Byron ]
The desert is mute, and dead men tell no tales. [ Laboulaye ]
Love's arms were wreathed about the neck of Hope,
And Hope kiss'd Love, and Love drew in her breath
In that close kiss and drank her whispered tales.
They say that Love would die when Hope was gone.
And Love mourned long, and sorrowed after Hope;
At last she sought out Memory, and they trod
The same old paths where Love had walked with Hope,
And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears. [ Tennyson ]
If the wave could speak in any other language than that of its own harsh thunder, how many tales of agony and suffering might it unfold. [ Selkirk ]
Many a wretch has rid on a hurdle who has done less mischief than utterers of forged tales, coiners of scandal, and clippers of reputation. [ Sheridan ]
If the secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader. [ Thackeray ]
All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to* indicate the one miracle of intellectual enlargement. [ Emerson ]
The importance of the romantic element does not rest upon conjecture. Pleasing testimonies abound. Hannah More traced her earliest impressions of virtue to works of fiction; and Adam Clarke gives a list of tales that won his boyish admiration. Books of entertainment led him to believe in a spiritual world; and he felt sure of having been a coward, but for romances. He declared that he had learned more of his duty to God, his neighbor and himself from Robinson Crusoe than from all the books, except the Bible, that were known to his youth. [ Willmott ]