myth quotes

Myth deals in false universals, to dull the pain of particular circumstances.

- Angela Olive Carter
  The Sadeian Woman,'Polemical Preface'.

O Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies'dreaming sod, Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

- (Harold) Hart Crane
  'To Brooklyn Bridge', in The Dial,  Jun.

Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel; And it was thou who on the boldest heel Stood up and flung the span on even wing Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing.

- (Harold) Hart Crane
  On Whitman and Brooklyn Bridge. The Bridge,'Cape Hatteras'.

To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofaras we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

- Leslie A(aron) Fiedler
  'Cross the BorderClose  the Gap', in Playboy, Dec.

La courtisane est un mythe. Jamais une femme n'a invente   une de b auche. The courtesan is a myth. No woman has ever invented any new sensual pleasure.

- Gustave Flaubert
  Letter to Mme Louise Colet,  Aug.

Fromthefirst place of liquid darkness, within thesecond place of air and light, I set down the following record with itsmixture of fact and truths and memories oftruths and its direction always toward theThird Place, where the starting point is myth.

-Janet Paterson also known as Jean PatersonFrame Frame
  To the Is-land, ch.1,'In the Second Place'.

It's a myth that if you're liked by only four people it must be good. It might also be very bad: they might be your mother, your brother, your uncle and your aunt.

- David Hockney
  David Hockney.

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.

- Henry Valentine Miller
  Plexus, ch.12.

the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth.

- Adrienne Cecile Rich
  Diving into theWreck,'Diving into theWreck'.

No blazoned banner we unfold One charge alone we give to youth, Against the sceptred myth to hold, The golden heresy of truth.

- GeorgeWilliam pseudonym  Ó Russell
'On Behalf of Some Irishmen not Followers ofTradition'.

The inscrutability of the East is, indeed, I believe a myth† The ordinary inhabitant is incomprehensible merely to people who never trouble to have anything much to do with them.

- Dame Freya Madeleine Stark
  TheJourney's Echo.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete.

-Wallace Stevens
  NotesToward A Supreme Fiction,'It Must BeAbstract'.

Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis.By myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth; and in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the scientific validity of psychoanalysis.

- D(onald) M(itchell) Thomas
TheWhite Hotel, author's note.

The poem†is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we seeit is, rather, a light by which we may seeand what we see is life.

- Robert Penn Warren
  In the Saturday Review, 22 Mar.