Quotes About Mythology

All the stories are true

We're called Shadowhunters. At least, that's what we call ourselves. The Downworlders have less complimentary names for us.

Magnus had heard the story of how the Nephilim were created many times. They must have forgotten to leave out the bit that said: And the Angel descended from on high and gave his chosen ones fantastic abs.

Maybe they didn't make vampires out of ugly people. Or maybe ugly people just didn't want to live forever.

Faeries believed in promises over fidelity of body or heart.

Underground, the stars are legend.

I explained that dreams have to present pictures, concrete images of emotional content. Just as mythology explains the human psyche through its images—its universal archetypes—dreams do the same thing on an individual level. They provide the dreamer with pictures of that individual's unconscious mind.

Legends, then, are seldom formed out of thin air. They grow out of something real. That original something may be extremely different from the final legend, but the kernel of truth is there nevertheless.

Just you wait. Papa Koschei is coming, coming, coming, over the hills on his red horse and he's got bells on his boots and a ring in his poket and he knows your name, Marya Morevna.

But this is a story, and in a story there is always someone beautiful enough." - 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects

Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.

It's only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than, well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea. It's all down to girls, one way or another.

Did you never wonder why the old books are so full of dragons chasing after maidens? The serpents think the girls are orphans, and long to get them away in a lair so that they may grow up strong and tall.

That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.

For the world has chosen and it says: make me whole. Think of us as a kind of haggard Calypso, offering everything, asking the world to choose anew. But it's a lie, really. There is only one choice and it is always the same. Only in Pentexore was any other ever possible. The world always says: I choose to wither and die if it means love and tapestries and sons and suitors, if it means stories and wars and a thousand ships launching. And we only give the world what it wants.

What happens to the West happens to Snow White, which is to say they both turn into jokes.

where there's a labyrinth, there's a minotaur, and vice versa! I can't imagine a decent maze that would be caught dead without a minotaur.

Hounds and hearthstones, girl, haven't you ever heard a story about Koschei? He's only got the one. Act one, Scene one: pretty girl. Act one, Scene two: pretty girl gone!

That's how it goes—as soon as there's anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it.

Orpheus asks his mother. She tells him the obvious: the entrance to hell is always in your own house, silly billy.

The Queen of a distant land fell in love with a bull. Nevermind how odd that sounds! The ancient world was as appalling place.

The opposite of Calypso is apocalypse.

All hands drowned, except the Red Hound of Mykenos, who bit the sea until it spit him back. Old

Greta, Greta, he whispered, eyes shut in rapture, on thy breast I write my Edda, at thy feet I lay the keys of Niflheim, by thy leave alone, I live, and breathe, and die.