Myth Quotes

“Myth is mirth dressed in mist.”
― Rick Mave, Oblivion

“Not only is myth, myth, not only is the opposition to myth, myth, but the recognition of the opposition to myth as myth is itself, myth.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences

“Macey once told me the program with the truth was that it was so poorly written. Given the choice, the pleasantly told lie is always more seductive. That's why religion is so potent, she said. Why history and science are still considered up for debate. Myth is more appealing than verified truth because the grey areas between the facts can still be used against us.”
― Malcolm Devlin, And Then I Woke Up

“But the mistery of the woman is no less a mystery than death. Childbirth is no less a mystery; nor the flow of the mother's milk; nor the menstrual cycle -in its accord with the moon. The creative magic of the female body is a thing of wonder in itself.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology

“The Atlantean Road by Stewart Stafford

A snake of stones
beneath the waters
Soldiers march
past spectral daughters

Phantom travellers
To work or home
Atlantean lives
replay in foam

The water drowned
out extinct times
Of joy and war
Of love and crime

The divers rapt
by sound immemorial
Echoes entombed
Sweet voices choral

The flame of Erasmus
and barking sounds
Of canine guards
and strangers found

The road roused
from silent sleep
To tell explorers
how ancients weep

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“When the land is thirsty, and the people that live on it die of hunger, starvation creates a Gashadokuro.”
― Florin-Marian Hera, The Emperor's Trail

“It is your task to walk back from the woods with an animal, not a pelt, not a corpse, but something alive. Curate that energy, feed it, don’t domesticate it, make culture from it. It should be walking alongside you, not slung over your shoulder. You build your structures from its growls.”
― Martin Shaw

“belief in the Fish is part of a larger myth that goes back to the legendary times of the Yellow Emperor. In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colors nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors.

One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms and reduced them to mere slavish reflections.

Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off. The first to awaken will be the Fish. Deep in the mirror we will perceive a very faint line and the color of this line will be like no other color. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. Side by side with these mirror creatures, the creatures of water will join the battle. In Yunnan they do not speak of the Fish but of the Tiger of the Mirror. Others believe that in advance of the invasion we will hear from the depths of mirrors the clatter of weapons.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

“Once upon a time, the gods took away the first ancestor of the sea elephants, coveting him for his exceptional beauty— tusks blue, body ivory.
The trauma of that original separation haunts every sea elephant thereafter and even when they sing, their songs contain five notes or fewer, the full octave missing from their music.”
― Shastri Akella, The Sea Elephants

“I was arrogant. It's a classic story of hubris. I'm like Icarus whose wings melted before he could fuck the sun.”
― Nicky Nichols

“When you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people listen. Others politely nod while slowly closing the door behind their eyes; you might as well be a proselytizing Jehovah's Witness or an encyclopedia peddler. Kind to you in person, what they say to others makes its way back to you: We don't know for certain that it's as bad as she says. The woman from the Dream House seems perfectly fine, even nice. Maybe things were bad, but it's changed? Relationships are like that, right? Love is complicated. Maybe it was rough, but was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“I’ve convinced myself that coffee tables are the 21st century equivalent of a castle in the sky.”
― Matt Puchalski, A Pandemic Gardening Journal

“For the Inklings, language is not a communication tool but rather a portal into being – an invisible reality summoned into our world through the shape and sound of words. Properly speaking, words are incantations.”
― Eugene Terekhin, Eleven Hidden Gems in the Works of the Inklings: The "Music of Iluvatar" in the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield

“Jack [Kerouac] was, in a sense, a twentieth-century American mythographer. And that’s why maybe those novels will stand up, because they will be one of the best statements of the myth of the twentieth century.”
― Gary Snyder

“I’ll never cease to admire the skill if not the pragmatism of historians & mythographers who manage to blend a number of small truths & probabilities into one large lie. Which hungry hero worshippers swallow whole, without the reservation of a doubt.”
― Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy

“Theory and mythology, natural and supernatural, science and magic are dichotomies shaped by later human reasoning. In fact, all of them are rooted in the search for the underlying forces behind the phenomena and the quest to enlist them on one's side.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Never wise to reveal the beauty of waters that put off fire when aveil”
― Ben Jr Grey

“If the alternative to believing in God is to believe in men, the myth is that there’s an alternative.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Where did they go, all the gods and the beasts? The jackals and winged horses, sphinxes and fish, all those creatures that weighed our organs in the afterlife, fed on years ill-lived? What do they tow now, those creatures that carried the suns and the stars, drew the moon to its place in the firmament each night?”
― Lars Horn, Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay

“Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive of such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit. That the imagination of man is capable of creating the myth of a more open, more generous time is not a sign of our folly.”
― Orson Welles

“Myths are healthy for creativity,
If you can tell myths from reality.
Imagination is almost a superpower,
If you can wield it without conspiracy.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth

“Most old stories don't have anything to do with facts; they're the box that all the facts come in.”
― John Straley, The Woman Who Married a Bear

“The angel could not belong to the faith in the way lightning could not belong to the myth of its making”
― Thomm Quackenbush, The Lifecycle of Suns

“And a people - or, for that matter, a human being - only has value to the extent that it is able to put the stamp of the eternal on its experiences; for in doing so it sheds, one might say, its worldliness and reveals its unconscious, inner conviction that time is relative and that the true meaning oflife is metaphysical.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings

“Even as a curious song filters through the streets of
San Miguel, one with the heartbeat of the guitarron, one with a melancholy melody, it isn’t enough to help him forget that he must continue to speak the creature's name. Not because it prevents the old gods from coming back to life, but to keep them from slipping into those dark places, like sun-obscured cenotes, where slivers of light cannot reach far enough to keep those malevolent things from being forgotten.”
― Mary Rajotte, Collage Macabre: An Exhibition of Art Horror

“Even as a curious song filters through the streets of San Miguel, one with the heartbeat of the guitarron, one with a melancholy melody, it isn’t enough to help him forget that he must continue to speak the creature's name. Not because it prevents the old gods from coming back to life, but to keep them from slipping into those dark places, like sun-obscured cenotes, where slivers of light cannot reach far enough to keep those malevolent things from being forgotten.”
― Mary Rajotte

“Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into the future so that we can take the next step… If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.”
― Ivan Illych

“Do you know why deconstructing from religion often feels like you are destroying yourself?

Because very early, they gave you their identity and you accepted it.

In deconstruction, this identity will be destroyed first.

So, yes, you are destroying your pseudo-self so that your real self will emerge.”
― Chidi Ejeagba

“Peace as rumor and hope as the stuff of myth is the manifestation of the person who cannot see beyond the short horizon of circumstance.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“A myth is a metaphor oblivious of itself”
― José Ortega y Gasset, Psychological Investigations