The Fair Folk/Quotes

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project Glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes, look behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.

—Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen,
We dare not throw a party, dude,

For fear of little men.

—from the back cover blurb of Mythology Abroad by Jody Lynn Nye

They steal cattle and babies...
They steal milk...
They love music, and steal away musicians...
In fact they steal everything.
We'll never be as free as them, as light as them, as beautiful as them; we are animals.

—Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

Like most of his race the fairy had a great multitude of names, honorifics, titles, and pseudonyms; but usually he was known as Cold Henry. Cold Henry made a long and deferential speech to his guest. The speech was full of metaphors and obscure allusions, but what Cold Henry seemed to be saying was that fairies were naturally wicked creatures who did not always know when they were going wrong.

—Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

Sit down by the fire and I'll tell ye a story to send ye away to your bed
Of the things ye hear creepin' when everyone's sleepin' and you wish you were out here instead
It isn't the mice in the wall, it isn't the wind in the well.

Every night they march out of that hole in the wall, passin' through on their way out of Hell.

—The Pogues, Sit Down By The Fire

"Far out in the center of this region is a place called the Chantry. It's supposed to hold all kinds of vast and ancient secrets, including a powerful being the natives only refer to as 'The Kind One'. Now, a title like that can mean a lot of things in folklore, like trying to placate something monstrous."

—Justin Augustine, City of Heroes

"Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."

—William Butler Yeats, The Stolen Child

Consider, for instance, a Fae who believes that he has fallen in love with a changeling, and she loves him in turn. One day, though, that will all fall apart, a house of cards whirling in a callous wind. The Fae might grow to hate the changeling's pandering attentions. Or maybe the Fae will one day ask a simple favor -- "Please, my dear, pass me the salt" -- and in the changeling's hesitation the Fae sees gross disobedience. As so he snaps her neck, wondering at the sounds that gurgle up from her collapsed trachea. Soon thereafter, he remembers the burbling of the honeyed brook outside his Arcadian home, and he returns to his world, managing to never think twice about how easily he killed his "love."

—Changeling: The Lost

I certainly didn’t set out to specialize in elves. But recently, I think I figured out where this pattern comes from. [...] As I was developing Samara, the cat character, I had a startling insight. Start with a cat; give her intelligence, weapons, magic, and art; allow her human height and stance; keep the attitude--what do you have?

The answer is, of course, an elf. Dip Samara in Nair, and the haughty little wench could walk around Evermeet without raising a winged eyebrow. So I suppose it makes sense for me to gravitate toward elves--I’m a cat person from way back.

—Elaine Cunningham

[G]ood fairies don't exist.

—Rae "Sunshine" Seddon, Sunshine by Robin McKinley

"Courage to strengthen,
Fire to blind,
Music to dazzle,

Iron to bind."

—Rhyme from The Wheel of Time which precedes the game of Snakes and Foxes, being a corrupted memory of the tools needed to fight the local version of the Fair Folk.

People in the know will tell you never to trust an elf. Whatever he or she tells you is invariably only part of the truth, and their true motivation is probably a complex web of secrets, half-truths, hidden agendas, wheels within wheels within wheels, and so on.

—Wulf, The Wulf Archives

Back to The Fair Folk