Ballads Quotes

“Sorry to break your fairytale, Little Fox, but ballads don't end happily, and neither do the two of us.”
― Stephanie Garber, The Ballad of Never After

“It's the ballads I like best, and I'm not talking about the clichéd ones where a diva hits her highest note or a rock band tones it down a couple of notches for the ladies. I mean a true ballad. Dictionary definition: a song that tells a story in short stanzas and simple words, with repetition, refrain, etc. My definition: the punk rocker or the country crooner telling the story of his life in three minutes, reminding us of the numerous ways to screw up.”
― Stephanie Kuehnert, Ballads of Suburbia

“A lot of ballads are about the mistakes we inevitably make while trying to figure out how to live our lives.”
― Stephanie Kuehnert, Ballads of Suburbia

“we not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particular
way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased.”
― William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

“I loved these songs and could still hear them in my head long after and into the next day. They weren't protest songs, though, they were rebel ballads... even in a simple, melodic wooing ballad there'd be rebellion waiting around the corner. You couldn't escape it. There were songs like that in my repertoire, too, where something lovely was suddenly upturned, but in stead of rebellion showing up it would be death itself, the Grim Reaper. Rebellion spoke to me louder. The rebel was alive and well, romantic and honorable. The Grim Reaper wasn't like that.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“Both were ballads about a woman "marked by the moon." In them, the Song Mage praised his muse, describing her midnight hair, her rosebud mouth, her rocky spine. They were odes to her unparalleled beauty.
"He's a little obsessed," said Emeline when she finished singing. "Even her teeth enchant him." She browsed through the next ballad---also about his moon-marked woman. "And she must have had some pretty sexy ankles, because there's an entire verse devoted to them in the next song...."
The corner of Hawthorne's mouth turned up. "Maybe ankles were his weakness."
Emeline glanced up at the boy cooking her dinner. He was like the forest, she thought. Quiet and steadfast in the way he held himself, with secrets hidden beneath.
What's your weakness? she wondered.”
― Kristen Ciccarelli, Edgewood

“O sweet, sweet Joanna
How torn my heart!
O sweet, sweet Joanna
Our kiss shall never part!

O sweet, sweet Joanna
How thine eyes do mine miss!
O sweet, sweet Joanna
Lushest green now turned to mist!

O sweet, sweet Joanna
How wicked the under-lord king!
O sweet, sweet Joanna
Who stole our cherished ring!”
― M.L. LeGette, The Orphan and the Thief

“And at the end of seven years the Queen of the Faeries pays a tithe to Hell,” Aikin finished, as he joined them. “That’s what it says in ‘Tam Lin’.”
― Tom Deitz, Dreamseeker's Road

“Some of these tales were about the ‘land beneath the waves’. This Irish fable tells of an enchanted world, under the water, and mortals may visit there at dusk, between the rising and the setting of the moon, when the water is still, and reflects like a mirror. They used to call it the ‘gates of glass’.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Calling: All Roads Lead Home

“... torches on either side of it illuminated carvings that were equally intricate and far more inviting. Evangeline saw symbols from countless Northern tales and ballads: star-shaped keys and broken books, knights in armour, a crowned wolf's head, winged horses, bits of castles, arrows and foxes, and twining vines of harlequin lilies.”
― Stephanie Garber, Once Upon a Broken Heart

“Scotland's contribution to American balladry is a subject which was either glossed over or neglected entirely by Cecil Sharp, the English folklorist and ballad collector, when he came over to the United States in search of traditional song poetry. Over here we are indebted to Sharp and to Miss Maud Karpeles for exploring the back country and helping us find what we had. Their visits were fruitful and their English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians is an exemplary work. But it is regrettable that a Scottish folklorist, familiar and in tune with Lowland traditions, was not close at hand to make a few claims of his own.

Somebody needed to suggest that Scotland had as good a claim to half the British ballads Sharp collected in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina as England has. Somebody might have suggested that English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians is a misleading title - that British Folk Songs would have been more accurate. For, after all, the most authoritative editor in the business, Francis J. Child, had clearly recognised two national traditions in his monumental English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which is the keystone work on which all subsequent studies have been based.”
― Herschel Gower, Saltire Review 20, Spring 1960

“In ballads, love is a disease, an affliction. You contract it as a mortal might contract one of their viruses. Perhaps a touch of hands or a brush of lips, and then it is as though your whole body is fevered and fighting it. But there's no way to prevent it from running its course.”
― Holly Black, The Prisoner’s Throne

“Folk-tales and ballads conceive of Elfland with a different notion of time to our own. Its people mirror the activities of our world as if to mock or distort them, and to our eyes seem immortal. They affect our world, bringing benefit or harm, but these results are not consonant with our rules, and may resemble the arbitrary operation of luck or chance. Although men may interact with these folk, they can neither understand nor trust them.

The Border Ballads in general are ready to accommodate similtaneously a theology of expiation, reward and punishment, and an Elfland which has no moral imperatives, and interpenetrates our own in unpredictable ways, even inserting off-spring among us by means of the changeling.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction