Myth Quotes - Page 19

• Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution's way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, and were dead of the plague by forty.

  Jennifer Weiner

  Girl, Nursing, Men

  Jennifer Weiner (2010). “Fly Away Home”, p.82, Simon and Schuster

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• History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Stuff

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “Tales from the Perilous Realm”, p.344, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expore a vulnerable opening, spreading not his charms but his defences, plotting to disrobe, somewhere along the night-- his body without the aperture of the heart or his heart with a door closed to his body. thus keeping one compartment for refuge, one uninvaded cell.

  Anais Nin

  Heart, Night, Doors

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• 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.

  Frances Hardinge

  Children, Exercise, Imagination

  Frances Hardinge (2011). “Fly By Night”, p.21, Pan Macmillan

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• And then he tells her stories. Myths he learned from his instructor. Fantasies he created himself, inspired by bits and pieces of others read in archaic books with crackling spines.

  Erin Morgenstern

  Book, Stories, Pieces

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• Here in the trees it was much easier to believe the absurdities that embarrassed me indoors. Nothing had changed in this forest for thousands of years, and all the myths and legends of a hundred different lands seemed much more likely in this green haze than they had in my clear-cut bedroom. Bella Swan Stephenie Meyer

  Stephenie Meyer

  Believe, Cutting, Swans

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• I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You’re doing the work and running your own business as well. It’s an incredibly organized state. [Also reading]…one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Running, Real, Believe

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

  Stephen King

  Reality, Firsts, Wanted

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• The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

  Walter Benjamin

  Children, Needs, Stories

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.112, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• You’re like a god from a Greek myth, Saiman. You have no empathy. You have no concept of the world beyond your ego. Wanting something gives you an automatic right to obtain it by whatever means necessary with no regard to the damage it may do. I would be careful if I were you. Friends and objects of deities’ desires dropped like flies. In the end the gods always ended up miserable and alone." — Kate Daniels

  Ilona Andrews

  Mean, Giving, Empathy

  Ilona Andrews (2009). “Magic Strikes”, p.68, Penguin

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• The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Ideas, Creative

  Stephen King (2000). “On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft”, p.59, Simon and Schuster

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• What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth.

  Anne Rice

  Mean, Kids, College

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• There is no one religion, no one truth and no myth lacks meaning

  Cassandra Clare

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• YOU YOU YOU your eyes, thick as a high school scrapbook crackling and yellow, curling at the edges a book of myths in which i do not appear.

  Clint Catalyst

  Book, School, Eye

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• It's what's known as an origin myth. What happened to me? That's no myth.

  Meg Cabot

  Happened, Known

  Meg Cabot (2011). “Abandon”, p.2, Scholastic Inc.

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• Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it we will be lured out of the peace and stability of the being God gave us, and seek to live in a myth we have created for ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.

  Thomas Merton

  Christian, Wisdom, Greatness

  Thomas Merton (2005). “No Man is an Island”, p.128, Shambhala Publications

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• It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and the ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly.

  Mary Zimmerman

  Dream, Giving, Important

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• “Aren’t all fairy tales based in fact? You yourself are supposed to be nothing more than a myth. Pandora’s box is a story parents read to their children at night,” she countered. “That means life itself is a fairy tale. Like the characters, we all live and love and search for a happily-ever-after.”

  Gena Showalter

  Children, Character, Mean

  "The Darkest Night". Book by Gena Showalter, 2008.

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• Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Dark, Men, Racism

  "Letter from a Birmingham Jail". www.africa.upenn.edu. April 16, 1963.

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• We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in this world. One child is given a light saber, another a wizard's education. The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of power, but to use well the kind you've been granted.

  Susan Cain

  Children, Light, Different

  Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.266, Broadway Books

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• In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Kids, Writing, Mean

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• I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting.

  John Green

  Lying, Mean, People

  John Green (2015). “Looking For Alaska Special 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.30, Penguin

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• The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

  Muriel Spark

  Art, Novelists, Different

  FaceBook post by Muriel Spark from Oct 28, 2014

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• Cacus.” I’d had years of practice looking dumb when people threw out Greek names I didn’t know. It’s a skill of mine. Annabeth keeps telling me to read a book of Greek myths, but I don’t see the need. It’s easier just to have folks explain stuff.

  Rick Riordan

  Book, Years, Practice

  Rick Riordan (2012). “The Demigod Diaries (Heroes of Olympus)”, p.58, Penguin UK

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• That is the Mongolian creation myth: out of two different natures love is born. In contradiction, love grows in strength. In confrontation and transformation, love is preserved.

  Paulo Coelho

  Love Is, Two, Different

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