“Forget trying to be Supermom - it's way too stressful and who needs more stress? Besides super heroes tend to wear a lot of clingy Lycra and none of us needs that.”

“Life is too short to eat food that doesn't taste good.”

“New Age spirituality purports to promote change – its mantra is ‘transformation’ – but, in reality, it endorses the status quo. It preaches changing oneself to accept the world as it is. New Agers are too busy with their affirmations and introspections to do anything like take direct action. Indeed, in some books the advice to unleash one’s inner goddess turns out to be little morethan to bring back the old ‘domestic goddess’. Using myth as one’s personal charter is nothing new (as we saw in Chapter 3), but when Alexander the Great chose Achilles, the psychopathic hero of Homer’s Iliad, to revere and emulate, he did so with action in mind. Alexander used classical myth as his ‘life coach’ and changed the world. New Agers use classical myth to ensure thatthe spirit is soothed, the horoscope reassuring, and the house clean, but the world stays the same.”

“We're not animals. We're not animals. We're not animals, we're not rabbits; we're people.”

“Make every misadventure an adventure.”

“This book aims to capture, and explore, the outrageousness,inventiveness, and sheer fun that characterize classical mythology.But it is also born of the conviction that myth matters. It mattered for the ancient Greeks and Romans, and it matters for us in understanding who we are: our selves, our liberties, and our lies.”

“When we rely on written records we need to continually ask ourselves what might be missing, what might have been recorded in order to manipulate events and in what direction, and in what ways we are allowing ourselves to assume that objectivity is in any way connected with literacy.”