Jokes spread around the world and embed themselves in our shared culture; the most resonant of them get lodged in the language in the same way as clichés or old wives' tales do. Jimmy Carr
Old wives' tales are not enough in a day when old wives and old men, too, are constantly moving away from their labours. Vincent Massey
Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave. Theodore Dreiser
The Lost Music was his way of talking about the way he believed that old wives' tales and dance tunes and folktales were just the tangled echoes of something that's not quite of this world ... something we all knew once, but have forgotten since. Charles de Lint