"If you wish to live and thrive, let a spider run alive. "
— old English nursery rhyme

"The protagonist of folktale is always, and intensely, a young person moving through ordeals into adult life. . . . and this is why there are no wicked stepchildren in the tales."
— Jill Paton Walsh ("Templates," Origins of Story, eds. Barbara Harrison & Gregory Maguire)

"Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again."
— Charles Stross (The Atrocity Archives)

"Once, at the dreaming dawn of history -- before the world was categorized and regulated by mortal minds, before solid boundaries formed between the mortal world and any other -- fairies roamed freely among men, and the two races knew each other well. Yet the knowing was never straightforward, and the adventures that mortals and fairies had together were fraught with uncertainty, for fairies and humans were alien to each other."
— Colin Thubron (Fairies and Elves)

""And this is what happened, ands this is why the caribou and the wolf are one; for the caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf that keeps the caribou strong.""
— Farley Mowat