27 Quotes by Alan Dundes

Life, it seems, is nothing if not a series of initiations, transitions, and incorporations.

Future orientation is combined with a notion and expectation of progress, and nothing is impossible.

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.

Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.

I mentioned that one of the tripartite formulas in American worldview involves time: past, present, and future.

Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.

The class has become over the years fairly large, running to three hundred or more, but I always insist upon reading all the student folklore collections myself. Although this is a tall order, I look forward to it because I learn so much from it.