“By means of our myths and legends we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are. Without them we should undoubtedly go mad.”
“Does progress mean that we dissolve our ancient myths? If we forget our legends, I fear that we shall close an important door to the imagination”
“Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.”
“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.”
“honor our sense of right and wrong-- our sense of what others need from us and how we ought to act towards them... Because we go against this sense-- because we fail to act as we feel we should-- that we grow resentful and feel alienated. We convince ourselves that others are making our lives intolerable. On the other hand, when we treat them as we feel we should, we have no occasion to feel this way. We can care openly for them because caring, not selfishness, is our "natural" condition (in computer jargon, our "default setting"). We alienate ourselves from theirs when we compromise our integrity, and we care for them when we don't.”
“Myths tell us what those like us have done, can do, should do. Without myths to lead the way, we hesitate to leap forward. Listen to the wrong myths, and we might even go back a few steps.”