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Footnote Quotes

“I remembered what Callum had said about Queen Arna--- that she had taken the poison within herself and somehow infected the realm with it, as a mortal might pass on a cold. It was a mad idea, of course, and yet simultaneously--- as is often the case in Faerie--- there was a sort of logic to it. Monarchs of Faerie do not merely inhabit their realms; they are thought to be intricately entwined.* *Wentworth Morrison's Folk-Lore of Scotland, Volume III: Thrones of Faerie (1852) remains the definitive resource on this topic, but Farris Rose's exhaustive investigation of Cornish faerie stories (in particular his Atlas of Tales, 1900) provides additional insight. Cornwall holds the record for the sheer number of interactions between mortals and monarchs of Faerie (Rose's "Comparative Analysis of the Faerie Markets of Bodmin Moor," published in Dryadological Fieldnotes in 1902, offers several intriguing theories as to why this might be so). In many of the tales recorded by Morrison and Rose, a faerie monarch's power is also their Achilles' heel: while they control the landscape and weather, they can be defeated by being trapped and removed from their homes, as a flower dies when uprooted from its soil. It was both a threat to Wendell's rule and the perfect revenge against him. He who had evaded the same poison was now forced to watch it consume his realm.”

“The Winter Gardener" is a similar tale, with the titular gardener replacing the shoemaker, but in this story, the gardener is merely a mortal woman who does not possess a secret identity. After the queen sacrifices herself to save her realm, the gardener plants a snowdrop over her grave, which grows as large as a tree and scatters its seeds across the realm; the tale is often used as an explanation for the perceived advantages of Irish snowdrops over those of other countries.”

“After all, as Prokhorov said, "Money nowadays comes in two stories." What Westerners could comprehend "two-story money"? A lathe operator during the war received, after deductions, eight hundred rubles a month, and bread cost 140 rubles on the open market. And that meant that in the course of one month he did not earn enough for even six kilos of bread, over and above his ration. In other words, he could not bring home even seven ounces a day for his whole family! But at the same time he did… live. With frank and open impudence they paid the workers an unreal wage, and let them go and seek "the second story." And the person who paid our plasterer [at the Kaluga Gates prison camp] insane money [200 rubles] for his evening's work also got to the "second story" on his own in some particular way. Thus it was that the socialist system triumphed, but only on paper. The old ways—tenacious, flexible—never died out, as a result of either curses or persecution by the prosecutors.”

“Below us was a frozen lake. It was perfectly round, a great gleaming eye in which the moon and stars were mirrored. Lanterns glowing the same cold white as the aurora dangled from the lake's edge to a scattering of benches and merchant-stands, draped in bright awnings of opal and blue. Delicious smells floated on the wind---smoked fish; fire-roasted nuts and candies; spiced cakes. A winter fair.* * Outside of Russia, almost all known species of courtly fae, and many common fae also, are fond of fairs and markets; indeed, such gatherings appear in stories as the interstitial spaces between their worlds and ours, and thus it is not particularly surprising that they feature in so many encounters with the Folk. The character of such markets, however, varies widely, from sinister to benign. The following features are universal: 1) Dancing, which the mortal visitor may be invited to partake in; 2) A variety of vendors selling foods and goods which the visitor is unable to recall afterwards. More often than not, the markets take place at night. Numerous scholars have attempted to document these gatherings; the most widely referenced accounts are by Baltasar Lenz, who successfully visited two fairs in Bavaria before his disappearance in 1899.”

“The Cubs are a major league baseball team based in Chicago. Apparently, the team was once cursed by a goat and is doomed now to never win the World Series. The 71 seats [auctioned by the Chicago Board of Exchange] are adjacent to the Cubs' dugout on the third-base line. This is an unnecessary detail needed to give color to what would otherwise be a dull and uninspiring narrative.”

“She is sending assassins after you because she thinks we are engaged, and thus her mad faerie logic tells her that I will devote my life to seeking revenge against her if she murders you." "That's generally how these things go. You know the stories." Of course I did. Deirde and the River Lord; The Princess of Shell Halls.* *Deirde was an Irish queen who sent her army into Faerie to avenge the death of her faerie husband at the hands of his brothers. The Princess of Shell Halls is likely of French origin, a variant of La princesse et le trône de sel. "Sel," meaning salt, was likely mistranslated as "shell," but the framework of the story is the same: a faerie princess of an undersea kingdom dedicates her life to avenging the death of her betrothed, the prince of an island realm. This despite the fact that leaving the sea condemns her to a slow death, to which she eventually succumbs only after murdering the last of the conspirators in her fiancé's murder.”

“Neither of us was hungry, but we managed to force down a little of Poe's bread, which was, as ever, delicious, buttery with a hint of chocolate, and very refreshing. Having finished the water we had brought with us, we were now forced to drink from creeks and streams. I was not happy about this, but there was no alternative.* *In some stories, drinking from faerie streams has the same effect upon mortals as faerie wine.”

“The protagonist of Grey Eminence was Amália, the world's first climate change artist* and the first person to exceed a billion followers on Instagram, making her a sort of global empress, unprecedented in the history of Earth. She was also Portugal's foremost performer of fado, a gold medalist in rhythmic gymnastics, excellent at baking, and capable of taming the aurochs she summoned back from extinction to revivify Lascaux. *What the author means here is that Amália was the first to view climate change itself as an art. Her oeuvre was above all a radical reinterpretation of the still life. She practiced extinction as well as large-scale action sculptures that undid or outmaneuvered natural processes such as decomposition and promoted catastrophes when opportunities--- weather-related or other--- arose.”