Quotes About Myth

Just so you know, when they say "Once upon a time" . . . they're lying

There is a mythic view of the South that's symbolized by the film "Gone With The Wind" that looks back fondly at slavery as a time when everything was happily in place - in place for whites.

The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise.

A hundred and fifty years after Oatman's return, writers—amateur and professional, religious and scholarly—continue to rework it, invariably reflecting their own cultural fantasies as vividly as Oatman's particular experience.

For all I know, the guy is Dracula.

In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.

In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

The Other Worlds which fairy tales explore open a way for writers and storytellers to speak in Other terms, especially when the native inhabitants of the imaginary places do not belong to an established living faith and therefore do not command belief or repudiation. The tongue can be very free when it is speaking outside the jurisdiction of religion.

They had forgotten the abuses, the murders, the corruption, the spying, the isolation, the fear: horror had become myth. Everybody had jobs and there wasn't so much crime.

One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them.

Eso era la historia, una rama de la fabulación que pretendía ser ciencia.

Y partió al alba, solo, como parten los héroes».

Whether this tale be true or false, none can tell, for none were there to witness it themselves.

Doctor: 'I am not a hero. Robin Hood: 'Well, neither am I, but if we both keep pretending to be, perhaps others will be heroes in our name. Perhaps we will both be stories and may those stories never end.

History is a burden. Stories can make us fly.

He no longer believes in the gods. He has heard too many contradictory stories on his travels. Better, surely, that everyone is deluded than that revelation has been so parsimoniously handed out. If he has a religion it is that of grass and rivers, of mountains and of skies that continue beyond the ends even of our longest journeys.

Alessandro sat up straight. How is it you think babies are born? Something the mother and father do before sex, some sort of cloth or herb or hard-boiled egg that the father puts in the mother or something, with a rubber bulb and a glass dish. No, Alessandro said. That's not quite it. No? No. You just have to have sex—if you're married, fifty times; if you're not married, once. You're kidding!

Typical of Iberia, both the Basques and the Catalans claim the word comes from their own languages, and the rest of Spain disagrees. Catalans have a myth that cod was the proud king of fish and was always speaking boastfully, which was an offence to God. Va callar! (Will you be quiet!), God told the cod in Catalan. Whatever the word's origin, in Spain lo que corta el bacalao, the person who cuts the salt cod, is a colloquialism for the person in charge.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

You can run down a demi-god only by making him out to be a demi-devil.  These

Perché una libertà fossilizzata, materializzata, dogmatizzata diventa una schiavitù, e gli uomini, rimanendo indifferenti alla notizia dell'avvenimento, documentarono la loro liberazione dalla schiavitù del mito cristiano, del materialismo cristiano.

it was even said that Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, had bitten the jugular of a priest;