Quotes About Myth

the assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and background, and that nonwhite women and our herstories are noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of female victimization.

That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures—because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer—because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage.

Briefly (Vladimir Nabokov) caught the (Superman) fever too, composing a poem, now lost, on the the Man of Steel's wedding night.

It is not difficult to understand why Caesar became history, Cleopatra a legend.

in the absence of facts, myth rushes in

To restore Cleopatra is as much to salvage the few facts as to peel away the encrusted myth and the hoary propaganda.

Witchcraft has always been a religion of poetry, not theology. The myths, legends, and teachings are recognized as metaphors for "That-Which-Cannot-Be-Told," the absolute reality our limited minds can never completely know.

the entire notion of the state undermining some primordial family privacy is a myth, because the nuclear family has never existed as an autonomous, private unit except where it was the synthetic creation of outside forces. The strong nuclear family is in large measure a creation of the strong state.

It takes seven years to digest gum.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful Indian maiden, of course.

He was, then, a hero. He suffered that disappointment which we would all have if we discovered that we were ourselves capable of those deeds which we most admire in history and legend. This, then, was a hero. After all, heroes were not much.

No labour was more Heraclean than the labour of being Heracles.

It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth.

The action is played out on the golden horizon between reality and legend, the beguiling penumbra where fable and fact coexist.

Myth can be a kind of human algebra, which makes it easier to manipulate truth about ourselves.

Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again.

Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world, with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness, and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad, and unjust. The Greeks created gods that were in their image: warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate but vengeful.

Men! It's not that they're brutish, boorish, shallow, and insensitive—though I dare say many are. It's just that they're so damned blind. So incredibly stupid. Men in myth and fiction at least. In real life we are keen, clever, and entirely without fault, of course.

I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark

The story that Newton was inspired by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat 'in a contemplative mood' and 'was occasioned by the fall of an apple.')

There was murder, there was rape, there were unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, the bloody myth, for the grail, for the Tower.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

God and heaven lasted about four years longer than the Tooth Fairy

Legends grow beards, and twenty-three years is plenty of time to grow a long one.