Quotes About Myth-making

When you're talking about rock n' roll, myth-making is what it's all about.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

Out of any conflict, the losers create more myths than the winners. It is hardly a surprise. After all, winners have little to explain to themselves. They won. For the loser, however, coping with defeat, dealing with it personally and explaining it to others, places enormous strains on the ego, self-respect, and sense of self-worth of the defeated.

I'm entranced by the idea of reading the culture back to itself, because I'm conscious that we as people and also as a culture are myth-making machines. So I'm interested in a resistance to that: What we can bend, what we can break.

Unfounded gossip can turn into sanctioned history if falls into the hands of the right storyteller.

One of the things I find exciting about Joan of Arc is how clearly the story of her life reveals the creation of myth, a process in which every one of us is involved - every one of us who tells stories and all those who listen, each informing the other.

There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape.

The United States is not unique among nations in forging an origin myth, but most of its citizens believe it to be exceptional among nation-states, and this exceptionalist ideology has been used to justify appropriation of the continent and then domination of the rest of the world.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind.

No one knows the true origins of these people, whom we now call Ottomans. They emerge from among the anonymous wandering Turkmen sometime around 1280, a caste of illiterate warriors living among tents and woodsmoke, who ruled from the saddle and signed with a thumbprint and whose history was subsequently reconstructed by imperial myth-making.

Maybe your self-mythology is no different than any other mythology. It's a story that changes in the telling, evolving over time. Whatever resonates will stay, and what doesn't will fall away. To pick away at the literal truth is to miss the point of it, miss the joy of it. So go ahead and build your myth. Try to tell a good story about yourself that captures something true, whether or not the facts agree.

Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.

I am very suspicious of cameras and dramatic interpretations and the whole Hollywood myth-making process. I don't trust it. I've seen it affect people in bad ways.

My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic.

Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.

As artists, we distort the truth and create the most amazing theories; we create entire philosophies and the most amazing religions; we create stories and superstitions about everything, including ourselves. And this is exactly the main point: We create them.

We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic

There's a reason that all societies and cultures and small bands of humans engage in myth-making. Fundamentally, it is to help us understand ourselves.

The conclusion that the myth-makers thought in much the same way as we still think in dreams is almost self-evident. The first attempts at myth-making can, of course, be observed in children, whose games of make-believe often contain historical echoes. But one must certainly put a large question-mark after the assertion that myths spring from the "infantile" psychic life of the race. They are on the contrary the most mature product of that young humanity.

This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.

But myth making, as it turns out, is not the sole prerogative of religion. It is also a very active secular and academic pastime—and a human one as well; perhaps it is some kind of human necessity.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

Zora," George Thomas informed me, "you come to de right place if lies is what you want. Ah'm gointer lie up a nation." Charlie Jones said, "Yeah, man. Me and my sworn buddy Gene Brazzle is here. Big Moose done come down from de mountain." "Now, you gointer hear lies above suspicion," Gene added.