“This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.”

“Hah!" said Granny Weatherwax. "I should just say it is a folk song! I knows all about folk songs. Hah! You think you're listenin' to a nice song about...cuckoos and fiddlers and nightingales and whatnot, and then it turns out to be about...something else entirely," she added darkly.”

“Man, that’s the only kind of book I like – one that’s so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.”

“And of course I'm in the press all the time. So many books have been written about me; Into thin air, up in the air,Gone with the wind-”

“Have you ever listened to folk music? Let's face it, a lot of folk music is all about dead sailors, mad witches, rape and fratricide.”

“I had not until then fully realized that I was odd, that there was anything strange about growing up with a single-parent genius. I thought all homes had equations scrawled with disc-marker across all the cabinets and walls, and clean laundry in the freezer, and defrosting chicken in the tool drawer. I thought everyone read a book a day and listened to hours of ancient music.”