Mythic Quotes

“Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.”
― Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works

“I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.”
― William Golding

“There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time.

The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.”
― Charles de Lint, Spiritwalk

“You used to be alive, now you’re almost mythic.”
― Alice Notley, Songs and Stories of the Ghouls

“Practical affairs task the human brain throughout the day. At night, the mind takes a deserved hiatus to consider the impossible and the absurd. In the carnage of our nighttime sleep tussles, the colored liqueurs of the true, the possible, fantasy, and the mythic beliefs become intermixed. Eyelets of the commonsensical and the imaginative are incorporated, and a new realism emerges out of our distilled perception of the veridical derived from the phenomenal realm of sensory reality and the philosophic world of ideals contained in the noumenal realm. The resultant psychobiologic vision immerses us in bouts of intoxicating inspiration and artistic stimulation and leaves us rickety boned and weakened after enduring a dreaded hangover of perpetual doubt laced with vagueness and insecurity.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“My parents had lived in California, long ago, when they were twenty and twenty-two, also newly married. This distant knowledge romanced me like a whiff of honey, the sweet and mythic prehistory of my existence.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“The gods had departed from the sky to relax at a tavern at the edge of the universe. Still, an extraordinary life took its course.”
― Seamus Paul Corcoran, Behind Blue Eyes: A Tale of Joe's Addiction

“You see? Age is no barrier to destiny.”
― Rosie Morgan, The Golden Sword

“When studied in great depth, mythology is one of the darkest subjects there is.”
― Priscilla Vogelbacher, Testament of the Hollow

“Whether you believe a word of the Bible or not, it's a beautifully written example of mythic storytelling. The moral ideals expressed in its pages are noble aspirations. Sadly, they are routinely ignored or (accidentally or deliberately) misinterpreted.”
― Stewart Stafford