myths Quotes

″‘But they’re stories,’ I said. ‘They’re—myths, to explain lightning and the seasons and stuff. They’re what people believed before there was science.‘”

Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from Outside.

“Something has crept, or has been driven out of dark waters under the mountains. There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.”

“The myth of the Tadpole Angel was complete. Now it could only grow and shape as legends are wont to do. Nothing I would ever do could change things. I had crossed the line to where only the greatest of the medicine men have ever been, perhaps even further, for not even the greatest were known by all the tribes and honored by all of the people. I had become a legend.”

“It was against the rules for normal people-human people like me and Charlie- to know about the clandestine world full of myths and monsters that existed secretly around us.”

“They may be surprised to hear words of gentle reasonableness coming from the mouths of Indians stereotyped in the American myth as ruthless savages.”

″‘And there were Dwarfs. And there were lovely little Fauns in all the woods. They had feet like goats. And—’ ‘That’s all nonsense, for babies,’ said the King sternly.”

“Rising Crete against their shore appears. There too, in living sculpture, might be seen The mad affection of the Cretan queen; Then how she cheats her bellowing lover’s eye; The rushing leap, the doubtful progeny, The lower part a beast, a man above, The monument of their polluted love.”

“It was a myth that every mother and daughter were best friends, but friendship was far less important than family. Friends came and went; family was always there.”

″...at that moment he turned into a weird creature, wild, concurrently young and old, dying and newborn. My father became a myth.”

“In telling the story of my father’s life, it’s impossible to separate the fact from the fiction, the man from the myth. The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me. It doesn’t always make sense, and most of it never happened. But that’s what kind of story this is.”

“See the TURTLE of enormous girth ... On his shell he holds the earth.”

“A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.”

“Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow.”

“How the myth wipes out the fact.”

“We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed – and they’re, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.”

“The devotee of myth is in a way a philosopher, for myth is made up of things that cause wonder.”

“I went to school and had no problems with my studies, but my own enthusiasm was in this maverick realm of the American Indian mythologies.”

“I remember the giants born so long ago; in those ancient days they raised me. I remember nine worlds, nine giantesses, and the seed from which Yggdrasil sprang.”

“Even cows know when they should go home and leave behind the fields, but an unwise man does not know the measure of his own appetite.”

“It was at the very beginning, it was Ymir’s time, there was no sand, no sea, no cooling waves, no earth, no sky, no grass, just Ginnungagap.”

“At every doorway before you enter, you should look around, you should take a good look around--for you never know where your enemies might be seated within.”

“The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you’ve never even thought of. And you’re stuck with you’re past when you’re stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.”

“Heed my words, all classes of men, you greater and lesser children of Heimdall. You summoned me, Odin, to tell what I recall of the oldest deeds of gods and men.”

“I have traveled so much, I have tried much, and I have often tested the mighty. How will there still be a sun when the wolf has eaten the one that now flies in heaven?”

“The boys departed, and the wind was favorable. They came to their father’s harbor, and then Geirroth, who stood foremost in the boat, sprang up on land and shoved the boar back out to sea and said: “Go wherever the trolls take you!”