Quotes from Helen Morales

What makes someone mythic is not whether or not he lived, or lived well, but whether or not he was larger than life. Mythic heroes were – and are – outrageous and outstanding. They are phenomenal. They distil some collective ideal or fantasy. That's why we can speak of 'the myth of John Lennon', but not 'the myth of John Major'. And it's also why Theseus made it and Lycurgus didn't.

The women of Juarez, and women across the world, do not want to have to take revenge, any more than Procne and Philomela did. What they want is to be able to rely on the modern gods -- the police, the courts, and the media -- for justice.

It was important for a Roman of this period to get his Greek mythology right. Being able to identify who was who and what was what was a sign that the viewer was a person of culture and status.

Responding to myth often means wearing blinkers. Myth is a complex game of production and reception that involves selecting some parts of a narrative and suppressing others. As we shall see later on, this process of communication is not always easily controlled.

If 'myth' is a slippery term, so is 'classical'. It is common shorthand for 'ancient Greek and Roman'. But this shorthand has a history, and a bias.

It is part of Elvis's enduring fascination to so many that his life story is always more than that; it is also a take (celebratory, critical, twisted) upon the American dream. To think about Elvis is to think about America: its history and its values.

the reason musicians like Elvis mean so much to us is that their music becomes the soundtrack to our lives. 'Blue Moon' was playing at my first school dance. When I hear it I remember the feeling of sweaty anticipation I felt that night. Rock 'n' roll wasn't something you listened to. It was something you danced to. It's about first kisses, first crushes, the creation of memories." I

Reading myth as crystallizing historical fact was a common approach in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But it is an approach to myth that is fraught with problems. It ignores or takes insufficient account of how mythic narratives are exploited for political purposes.

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.

Scholars have produced as many definitions of myth as there are myths themselves. This book will discuss various definitions of myth as it goes along, but it is interested in myth as a process as much as a thing.

However, I have also argued for allegory's positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed.

The Wizard of Oz, a master narrative of the questing journey, not only tells us that there will be disenchantment with the object of the quest, disenchantment perhaps built into any relationship that is based on idealization, but also stresses that what the seeker is really looking for is to be found in herself. Indeed, it is a cliché of the pilgrimage that it fundamentally involves the universal quest for the self.

without Dolly Parton there would have been no Taylor Swift.

The Dixie Chicks are another obvious absence, and it is hard not to suspect that they are being ostracized from the museum because of lead singer Natalie Maines's criticism of George W. Bush for America's invasion of Iraq in 2003, which provoked a storm of controversy.

Poverty is only ennobling, it is implied, if one has escaped it.

Dolly is both Cinderella and her fairy godmother, and she has no need for a Prince Charming.

The diet industry is built upon an ideology of racial, as well as gender, prejudice.20