Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Joseph Campbell

Quote by Joseph Campbell

Author

Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell was an American writer, scholar, and mythologist, renowned for his studies of world mythology. His work, 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces', has had a profound impact on modern culture, widely used in literature, film, and psychology fields. more

You May Also Like

“She remembered, as she watched herself, the aches in her shoulders and arms. The stiff heaviness of them, as if she'd been wearing armour. She remembered not understanding why, for all that effort, the silhouette of the sycamore trees stubbornly stayed the same size, just as the bank stayed exactly the same distance away. She remembered swallowing some of the dirty water. And looking around at the other bank, the bank from where she had come and the place where she was kind of now standing, watching, along with that younger version of her brother and his friends, beside her, oblivious to her present self, and to the bookshelves on either side of them. She remembered how, in her delirium, she had thought of the word 'equidistant'. A word that belonged in the clinical safety of a classroom. Equidistant. Such a neutral, mathematical kind of word, and one that became a stuck thought, repeating itself like a manic meditation as she used the last of her strength to stay almost exactly where she was. Equidistant. Equidistant. Equidistant. Not aligned to one bank or the other. That was how she had felt most of her life. Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.”

“Life is always an act,' Mrs. Elm said, as they watched her brother being pulled back from the water's edge by his friends. As he then watched a girl whose name she'd long forgotten make an emergency call. 'And you acted when it counted. You swam to that bank. You clawed yourself out. You coughed your guts out and had hypothermia but you crossed the river, against incredible odds. You found something inside you.”