85 Mythical Quotes

From ancient legends to contemporary retellings, myths have always been a rich source of wisdom, intrigue, and inspiration. These timeless tales often encapsulate profound truths about human nature, morality, and the mysteries of the universe. In this blog post, we've gathered a curated collection of the top 85 mythical quotes, providing a glimpse into the minds of gods, heroes, and sages from various cultures. Whether you're seeking inspiration, reflection, or a touch of the fantastical, these quotes will transport you to worlds where the extraordinary becomes possible and the timeless lessons of myth endure.

1. “The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.[Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962]” - John F. Kennedy

2. “All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.” - Diane Setterfield

3. “The place where the story happened was a world on the back of four elephants perched on the shell of a giant turtle. That's the advantage of space. It's big enough to hold practically anything, and so, eventually, it does.People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood. It believes mere size is amazing.There's nothing amazing about size. Turtles are amazing, and elephants are quite astonishing. But the fact that there's a big turtle is far less amazing than the fact that there is a turtle anywhere.” - Terry Pratchett

4. “If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.” - Diana Wynne Jones

5. “When he, whoever of the gods it was, had thus arranged in order and resolved that chaotic mass, and reduced it, thus resolved, to cosmic parts, he first moulded the Earth into the form of a mighty ball so that it might be of like form on every side … And, that no region might be without its own forms of animate life, the stars and divine forms occupied the floor of heaven, the sea fell to the shining fishes for their home, Earth received the beasts, and the mobile air the birds … Then Man was born:… though all other animals are prone, and fix their gaze upon the earth, he gave to Man an uplifted face and bade him stand erect and turn his eyes to heaven.” - Ovid

6. “Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word 'myth' only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.” - Adam Kirsch

7. “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this artificial scaffolding...{Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823}” - Thomas Jefferson

8. “It was a rainy night. It was the myth of a rainy night.” - Jack Kerouac

9. “Myth is what we call other people's religion.” - Joseph Campbell

10. “As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.” - Walter Benjamin

11. “I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.” - steve erickson

12. “For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.” - Stanisław Lem

13. “A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century 'reality', surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth. In approaching literature, it has aimed at restoring to the word its magical qualities. And at giving back to language the elemental power it once had within society. This determinism lies at the heart of the surrealist attitude and distinguishes it radically from the modernism which took shape contemporaneously with it.” - Michael Richardson

14. “All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

15. “As with . . . even the written word, the remote overview is one more wrenched perspective that developing civilization has glued, collagelike, to the once unified experience of life.” - Bruce Berger

16. “Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

17. “The truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it. ” - Konrad Lorenz

18. “To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.” - Loren Eiseley

19. “Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!” - Robert G. Ingersoll

20. “We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: "I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely.” - C. S. Lewis

21. “We have seen that a myth could never approached in a purely profane setting. It was only comprehensible in a liturgical context that set it apart from everyday life; it must be experienced as part of a process of personal transformation. None, of this surely applies to the novel, which can be read anywhere at all witout ritual trappings, and must, if it is any good, eschew the overtly didactic. Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the mythology. It can be seen as a form of mediation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It prljects them into another worl, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not 'real' and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel bcomes part of the backdrop of lives long after we have laid the book aside. It is an excercise of make-believe, that like yoga or a religious festival breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies to empathise with others lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to 'feel with' others. And, like mythology , an important novel is transformative. If we allow it do so, can change us forever.” - Karen Armstrong

22. “I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long.If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.” - Christopher Hitchens

23. “Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind” - Joseph Campbell

24. “The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.” - C.S. Lewis

25. “The gods have become our diseases.” - C.G. Jung

26. “By myth I mean the arrangement of the incidents” - Aristotle

27. “One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster.” - John Michael Greer

28. “The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. The language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language that makes Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer heaven, and that it is time to return to earth. [p.98]” - Northrop Frye

29. “Your money myth affects your gain and luck.In economics, illusion of money affects wealth.” - Toba Beta

30. “There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.” - Rollo May

31. “Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.” - Rollo May

32. “I earn the magic of words by writing.I learn the myth of worlds by imagining.” - Toba Beta

33. “First bubble baths. Now Disney parks. You're shattering every creep vampire myth I've ever heard.” - Jeaniene Frost

34. “[On Jason Mashak's book SALTY AS A LIP, as reviewed in The Prague Post:] Mashak amalgamates various national, historical and religious traditions into a myth-mash that illuminates many sects' fanatical compartmentalizing, and the fact that so many religions and philosophies share similar goals, if not roots.” - Stephan Delbos

35. “Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.” - Joseph Campbell

36. “Myth could be as sustaining as reality - sometimes even more so.” - Alexander McCall Smith

37. “The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.” - Joseph Campbell

38. “In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of myth.” - Margaret Atwood

39. “[Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood to it; but a myth is a story of a certain kind. The myths of a culture are those stories it takes seriously—the ones that are thought to be a key to its identity.” - Margaret Atwood

40. “Rising up into the air, they took to the sky and flew. From west and beyond west, into the wind and through it, they came past countless moons and suns. One laughed and briefly wore a scarf of raindrops in her hair, and then with wicked feet she kicked a cloud and caused rain to swamp a boat.” - Pat O'Shea

41. “The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved—by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millenniums. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us courage to face the Minotaur, and the means then to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain?” - Joseph Campbell

42. “As you set out on your journey to Ithaca,pray that your journey be a long one,filled with adventure, filled with discovery.Laestrygonians and Cyclopes,the angry Poseidon--do not fear them:you'll never find such things on your wayunless your sight is set high, unless a rareexcitement stirs your spirit and your body.The Laestrygonians and Cyclopes,the savage Poseidon--you won't meet themso long as you do not admit them to your soul,as long as your soul does not set them before you.Pray that your road is a long one.May there be many summer morningswhen with what pleasure, with what joy,you enter harbors never seen before.May you stop at Phoenician stations of trade to buy fine things,mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,and voluptuous perfumes of every kind--buy as many voluptuous perfumes as you can.And may you go to many Egyptian citiesto learn and learn from those who know.Always keep Ithaca in your mind.You are destined to arrive there.But don't hurry your journey at all.Far better if it takes many years,and if you are old when you anchor at the island,rich with all you have gained on the way,not expecting that Ithaca will give you wealth.Ithaca has given you a beautiful journey.Without her you would never have set out.She has no more left to give you.And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not mocked you.As wise as you have become, so filled with experience,you will have understood what these Ithacas signify.” - Barry B. Powell

43. “The two things that came out clearly were the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader.[C.S. Lewis writes to J.R.R. Tolkien on December 7, 1929]” - C.S. Lewis

44. “Humans are a story telling species. Throughout history we have told stories to each other and ourselves as one of the ways to understand the world around us. Every culture has its creation myth for how the universe came to be, but the stories do not stop at the big picture view; other stories discuss every aspect of the world around us. We humans are chatterboxes and we just can't resist telling a story about just about everything.However compelling and entertaining these stories may be, they fall short of being explanations because in the end all they are is stories. For every story you can tell a different variation, or a different ending, without giving reason to choose between them. If you are skeptical or try to test the veracity of these stories you'll typically find most such stories wanting. One approach to this is forbid skeptical inquiry, branding it as heresy. This meme is so compelling that it was independently developed by cultures around the globes; it is the origin of religion—a set of stories about the world that must be accepted on faith, and never questioned.” - Nathan Myhrvold

45. “It was not enough that food aplenty was within Man’s grasp: he wanted more.It was not enough that prey surrendered themselves to Man according to the natural order: Man wanted to cook his prey. Man had discovered fire when lightning stuck and set a tree or two alight, but he was clumsy and greedy and stupid and could not keep the flame alive” - David Bowles

46. “We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity.” - David Watson

47. “I just wish this social institution [religion] wasn't based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isn't true.” - Andy Rooney

48. “Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution's way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, and were dead of the plague by forty.” - Jennifer Weiner

49. “Well, someone told someone and someone told someone else, you know how it is, that if you filled jugs with water and placed them around the edges of your lawn that you’d be protected. Ghost and witches can’t cross over water, it turns out.” - Richard Yañez

50. “Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth and legend, our ancestors believed to be history and everything in our history includes myths and legends. Before the splendid modern-day mind was formed our cultures and civilizations were conceived in the wombs of, and born of, what we identify today as "fiction, unreality, myth, legend, fantasy, folklore, imaginations, fabrications and tall tales." And in our suddenly realized glory of all our modern-day "advancements" we somehow fail to ask ourselves the question "Who designated myths and legends as unreality? " But I ask myself this question because who decided that he was spectacular enough to stand up and say to our ancestors "You were all stupid and disillusioned and imagining things" and then why did we all decide to believe this person? There are many realities not just one. There is a truth that goes far beyond what we are told today to believe in. And we find that truth when we are brave enough to break away from what keeps everybody else feeling comfortable. Your reality is what you believe in. And nobody should be able to tell you to believe otherwise.” - C. JoyBell C.

51. “They yoked themselves to a car and drew her all the long way through dust and heat. Everyone admired their filial piety when they arrived and the proud and happy mother standing before the statue prayed that Hera would reward them by giving them the best gift in her power. As she finished her prayer the two lads sank to the ground. They were smiling and they looked as if they were peacefully asleep but they were dead. (Biton and Cleobis)” - Edith Hamilton

52. “Stories are psycho-diagnostic ― they diagnose the condition of our psyches. When we watch, read or hear a story, whatever detail jumps out reflects an issue in our psyche that requires our attention.” - Thea Euryphaessa

53. “What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?” - Friedrich Nietzsche

54. “But no-one came here to live an ordinary life. Despite what our somnambulistic, mythless society society tells us — a place stuffed to the gilders with unawake, unthinking folk ruled by shoulds, oughts and have-tos; people who have no understanding of themselves; individuals afraid to acknowledge, let alone live their dreams — you came here to weave your unique essence and vision into the world, thus rendering it magnificent, both for yourself and others.” - Thea Euryphaessa

55. “Camels can go many weeks without drinking anything at all. The notion that they cache water in their humps is pure myth—their humps are made of fat, and water is stored in their body tissues. While other mammals draw water from bloodstreams when faced with dehydration, leading to death by volume shock, camels tap the water in their tissues, keeping their blood volume stable. Though this reduces the camel’s bulk, they can lose up to a third of their body weight with no ill effects, which they can replace astonishingly quickly, as they are able to drink up to forty gallons in a single watering.” (pp.69-70)” - Michael Benanav

56. “Believe reality is what you were taught was myth.” - Nicholas A. McGirr

57. “We hold this myth to be potentialNot self-evident but equationalAnother DimensionOf another kind of Living Life” - Sun Ra

58. “The myth of quantum consciousness sits well with many whose egos have made it impossible for them to accept the insignificant place science perceives for humanity, as modern instruments probe the farthest reaches of space and time. ... quantum consciousness has about as much substance as the aether from which it is composed. Early in this century, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity destroyed the notion of a holistic universe that had seemed within the realm of possibility in the century just past. First, Einstein did away with the aether, shattering the doctrine that we all move about inside a universal, cosmic fluid whose excitations connect us simultaneously to one another and to the rest of the universe. Second, Einstein and other physicists proved that matter and light were composed of particles, wiping away the notion of universal continuity. Atomic theory and quantum mechanics demonstrated that everything, even space and time, exists in discrete bits – quanta. To turn this around and say that twentieth century physics initiated some new holistic view of the universe is a complete misrepresentation of what actually took place. ... The myth of quantum consciousness should take its place along with gods, unicorns, and dragons as yet another product of the fantasies of people unwilling to accept what science, reason, and their own eyes tell them about the world.” - Victor J. Stenger

59. “What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness ofnormality that is just a myth.” - Anne Rice

60. “Go on, my dear," urges the snake. "Take one. Hear it? 'Pluck me,' it's saying. That big, shiny red one. 'Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard.' You know you want to.""But God," quotes Eve, putting out feelers for an agent provacateur, clever girl, "expressly forbids us to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.""Ah yessssss, God ... But God gave us life, did He not? And God gave us desire, did He not? And God gave us taste, did He not? And who else but God made the damned apples in the first place? So what else is life for but to tassste the fruit we desire?"Eve folds her arms schoolgirlishly. "God expressly forbade it. Adam said."The snake grins through his fangs, admiring Eve's playacting. "God is a nice enough chap in His way. I daresay He means well. But between you and The Tree of Knowledge, He is terribly insecure.""Insecure? He made the entire bloody universe! He's omnipotent.""Exactly! Almost neurotic, isn't it? All this worshiping, morning, noon, and night. It's 'Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise the Everlassssting Lord.' I don't call that omnipotent. I call it pathetic. Most independent authorities agree that God has never sufficiently credited the work of virtual particles in the creation of the universssse. He raises you and Adam on this diet of myths while all the really interesting information is locked up in these juicy apples. Seven days? Give me a break.” - David Mitchell

61. “In the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know.” - G.K. Chesterton

62. “And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.” - Stacy Schiff

63. “Alte Männer sind eine rachsüchtige Brut. Sie beneiden junge Männer um ihre Kraft und verübeln jungen Frauen ihre Verführungsmacht.” - Emilia Polo

64. “Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn’t trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he’d been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill.I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class... “Stories aren’t real,” he told me shortly. “They don’t feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding ‘family’ in the nearest gang.” Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. “Write down the names of some books,” she said. “Maybe we’ll read them.”I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint – for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young lives. Stories that use the power of myth to speak truth to the human heart.Charles de Lint creates a magical world that’s not off in a distant Neverland but here and now and accessible, formed by the “magic” of friendship, art, community, and social activism. Although most of his books have not been published specifically for adolescents and young adults, nonetheless young readers find them and embrace them with particular passion. I’ve long lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people from troubled backgrounds say that books by Charles saved them in their youth, and kept them going.Recently I saw that parole officer again, and I asked after his work. “Gets harder every year,” he said. “Or maybe I’m just getting old.” He stopped me as I turned to go. “That writer? That Charles de Lint? My wife got me to read them books…. Sometimes I pass them to the kids.”“Do they like them?” I asked him curiously.“If I can get them to read, they do. I tell them: Stories are important.” And then he looked at me and smiled.” - Terri Windling

65. “Myth is a cloud based upon a shadow based upon the movement of the breeze.” - Alexander McCall Smith

66. “But are they heroes or mere dreamers?” - Gaius Valerius Flaccus

67. “Now, I pray you, cast yourself into a different world, a different trail of thought; step into a place where dragons live and breathe, where they are as real in touch and voice as you or I. Where they face the same extinction every day that they have suffered in our world: the extinction of myth . . . yet where they battle every moment to fend off such a fate for another day . . .” - Alexis Steinhauer

68. “It's a good country for myths. Things seem to take root here.” - Diana Gabaldon

69. “...a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.” - Karen Armstrong

70. “But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.No, said Tolkien, they are not....just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand.” - Humphrey Carpenter

71. “If I say I do not believe in faeries or elves or trolls, does this imply that I have a set of beliefs and a lifestyle that adheres to this lack of belief? NO, IT ONLY IMPLIES that I do not believe in faeries, elves and trolls. So one cannot extrapolate morality, philosophy, cosmology, character, political party, or any other thing of that sort from the mere lack of belief in one other thing.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

72. “This is the power of myth: that we can experience invisible spiritual realities and truths greater than visible, material things in story form.” - John Granger

73. “Every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends. You must tell the people you work with. You must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and all. And once you do, you will feel so much better” - Harvey Milk

74. “..and why the winter suns so rush to bathe themselves in the seaand what slows down the nights to a long lingering crawl...” - Virgil

75. “the dank night is sweeping down from the skyand the setting stars incline our heads to sleep.” - Virgil

76. “But the queen--too long she has suffered the pain of love,hour by hour nursing the wound with her lifeblood,consumed by the fire buried in her heart. [...]His looks, his words, they pierce her heart and cling--no peace, no rest for her body, love will give her none.” - Virgil

77. “The signs of the old flame, I know them well.I pray that the earth gape deep enough to take me downor the almighty Father blast me with one bolt to the shades,the pale, glimmering shades in hell, the pit of night,before I dishonor you, my conscience, break your laws.” - Virgil

78. “Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing.Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless.Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live.” - Terri Windling

79. “The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.” - C.S. Lewis

80. “Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

81. “The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There is no telling which twin will fall asleep first, allowing the other's colors to dominate, for how long. The design grows, the overlay deepens. The beaders have no other order at the heart of their being. Do you know that the beads are sewn onto the fabric of the earth with endless strands of human muscle, human sinew, human hair? We are as crucial to this making as other animals. No more and no less important than the deer.” - Louise Erdrich

82. “He carried her over the Owl Creek mountain range without stopping,” he said, quietly this time. “He carried her until he reached one of the hot springs around what became Chapin, and then he walked into the water with her and held her there for three days. He had about given up when she opened her eyes and whispered his name.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

83. “For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.” - Julian Barnes

84. “When we kissed, the skies had never appeared more heavenly, nor the seas a more brilliant shade of sapphire blue.” - Jennifer Silverwood

85. “There is a very popular opinion that choosing life is inherently superior to choosing death. This belief that life isinherently preferable to death is one of the most widespread superstitions. This bias constitutes one of the most obstinate mythologies of the human species.” - Mitchell Heisman