“It is a rare goal that has only one path.”

“Isn't it interesting how we often fight who we truly are, what we truly want and that which we truly deserve?”

“The more you appreciate, the more you have to appreciate.”

“This brings me to the question of the antiquity of the belief in fairies and to the associated problem of the existence of strata or stages in fairy belief. The antiquity of the belief is revealed by the wide distribution of tales concerning fairies, while it is also indicated by the antipathy of the elves to iron and salt - ancient taboos both. Not only so, but many traits respecting fairies, especially shape-shifting and the belief in their semi-corporeal state, are eloquent of primitive notions. That the process of the fairy belief witnessed more than one stage of development in the course of successive ages appears more than probable. 'The fairies of one race,' remarks Wentz, 'are the people of the preceding race.' If this statement lacks a certain precision, one realizes the implication; that is, that the ghosts or gods of a preceding race may come to be regarded by their successors as fairies.”

“All three of the English types I have mentioned can, I think, be accounted for as the results of the presence of different cultures, existing side by side in the country, and who were the creation of the folk in ages distantly removed one from another. In a word, they represent specific " strata" of folk-imagination. The most diminutive of all are very probably to be associated with a New Stone Age conception of spirits which haunted burial-mounds and rude stone monuments. We find such tiny spirits haunting the great stone circles of Brittany. The "Small People," or diminutive fairies of Cornwall, says Hunt, are believed to be "the spirits of people who inhabited Cornwall many thousands of years ago. "The spriggans, of the same area, are a minute and hirsute family of fairies" found only about the cairns, cromlechs, barrows, or detached stones, with which it is unlucky to meddle." Of these, the tiny fairies of Shakespeare, Drayton, and the Elizabethans appear to me to be the later representatives. The latter are certainly not the creation of seventeenth-century poets, as has been stated, but of the aboriginal folk of Britain.”

“And even these ((the common hill fairy, the standard elf of folk-lore) are in danger of being banished into the limbo of forgetfulness by the quite artificial fairy of juvenile literary commerce, with gauzy wing and skirts reminiscent of the ballet. It has always seemed to me extraordinary that literature has been able to create wings where none were before, for our native fairies are as wingless as ourselves. But for such an innovation the Elizabethan poets and playwrights were probably responsible - a topic which we must consider in another chapter.”

“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.”