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Mythology Quotes

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Mythology Quotes

“The harpy wants to win, which means a man must lose. She wants justice, which means a man must be punished. She wants space that could be taken by a man. Are we really willing to make that sacrifice? What makes a woman's ambition predatory, we are told, is that it overflows its natural bounds. It treads on the lands that men have marked as theirs.”

“For the fact is when men are hand, innocent or guilty, their semen, that salty white milk, falls onto the Earth and there are on that very spot we spring up... Why men should ejaculate in the throes of death is a mystery even to me. Perhaps death really is the consummation of life, or maybe it's the last act of the body desperate to bequeath a life that will go on even as its own is obliterated. But I like to believe it is a final one-fingered gesture of defiance at their executioners, the only obscene gesture they can make since their hands are tightly bound behind them. Whatever the reason, felons with their dying gasp impregnate our mother and so we, the mandrakes, are conceived.”

“There’s a name for what I am, Odys. I’m your Automaton. You’re my new Master. When Pepin, my old Master, killed himself, he canceled the bond I shared with him. I became functionless—stagnant—inanimate. I couldn’t change from my object-form until you touched me—until I took your soul. I need a soul to fuel me—to wind me up. We’re like machines— our soul is the rechargeable battery. But I’m far from wires, gears, and bolts.”

“A human society without myth has never been known, and indeed it is doubtful whether such a society is at all possible. One measure of man's advance from his most primitive beginnings to something we call civilization is the way in which he controls his myths, his ability to distinguish between the areas of behavior, the extent to which he can bring more and more of his activity under the rule of reason.”

“¨Una historia, dos caminos: oscuridad y luz, ¿cuál eliges? No vayas por el camino fácil, no aprenderás nada. Atrévete a adentrarte en el bosque oscuro, el silencio de la noche te contará secretos ocultos. Los animales nocturnos te enseñarán un mundo mágico, que te servirá de guía para encontrar la luz. No temas, todo lo que ves es nada más que tu reflejo en el espejo del mundo, donde todo se conecta y se encuentra. Buen viaje.¨”

“For the fact is when men are hanged, innocent or guilty, their semen, that salty white milk, falls onto the Earth and there on that very spot we spring up... Why men should ejaculate in the throes of death is a mystery even to me. Perhaps death really is the consummation of life, or maybe it's the last act of the body desperate to bequeath a life that will go on even as its own is obliterated. But I like to believe it is a final one-fingered gesture of defiance at their executioners, the only obscene gesture they can make since their hands are tightly bound behind them. Whatever the reason, felons with their dying gasp impregnate our mother and so we, the mandrakes, are conceived.”

“Q huff-sighed. “I doubt ex-gods give a fuck about anything but their own skin at this point. That’s why the game exists, because of gods wanting to get rid of the parts they’re not so happy with. This is the spare parts’ last chance. Beasts won’t risk non-existence for someone else. Not unless they’re mad. Not unless they’re formed without…reason.” “We deal with the foreskins of the gods,” Admund mumbled to the wall. “None of them are brains.”

“She's like cream, she's that soft. Once her thighs are around you, you'll forget your own name. The boys' voices had been sharp with excitement, their color high. But when I tried to imagine what they spoke of, my mind slid away, like a fish who would not be caught. Other images came in their stead. The curve of a neck bent over a lyre, hair gleaming in firelight, hands with their flickering tendons. We were together all day, and I could not escape: the smell of the oils he used on his feet, the glimpses of skin as he dressed.”

“Or, rather, there is a duel between them: death toys with life, life toys with death. Which of the two succumbs? Stanislaw Lec reverses the terms here: it is not we who defend ourselves against death, it is death that defends itself against us: 'Death resists us, but it gives in in the end.' Nothing else so stunning as this has ever been said about death. Needless to say, this dual relationship has nothing to do with interactivity, which is a parody of it. There is nothing interactive in the antagonistic process of reversibility and becoming. The feminine and the masculine are not 'interactive': that is ridiculous. Life and the world are not interactive -life isn't a question-and-answer session or a video game. There is nothing interactive in words when they are articulated in language. Interactivity is a gigantic mythology, a mythology of integrated systems or of systems craving integration, a mythology in which otherness is lost in feedback, interlocution and interface - a kind of generalized echography.”

“...debe insistirse continuamente en que «femenino» y «masculino» no son entidades en sí mismas; no son figuras arquetípicas de una diferenciación absoluta con campos de aplicación fijos y predeterminados. Son términos de una relación continua, que toman su significado el uno del otro: Por ejemplo, conteniendo y emergiendo, recibiendo y actuado, conservando y dinamizando; la base y su diferenciación, el todo y su parte.”

“Ultimately, whether myth is religion or folk tale is, and always has been, a question of faith. When Europeans encountered the narratives of the peoples they colonized, they dismissed them as ‘myths’—whence the modern, pejorative sense of ‘myth’ as ‘fiction’ or ‘falsehood’—but their own Garden of Eden, Holy Trinity, and Easter Resurrection they regarded instead as theology.”

“I continue to grapple to find new terminology for talking about the religious life. Each age needs its own language for understanding enduring truths, and while many people feel uncomfortable talking about religion, our ego-centered, so-called real life is disintegrating at this point in history. The ancient world didn’t have much of what we call reality; they lived, instead, by the slender threads. We have gained ego reality but have lost the mystical and religious functions that should guide our lives.”

“...all you have to do is read the newspaper. It's a mess. On this immediate level of life and structure, myths offer life models. But the models have to be appropriate to the time in which you are living, and our time has changed so fast that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. The virtues of the past are the vices of today. And many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. The moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now. And that is what we are not doing. The old-time religion belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe. By going back you throw yourself out of sync with history.”

“His gaze, which had been following the circling fruit, flickered to mine. I did not have time to look away before he said, softly but distinctly, “Catch.” A fig leapt from the pattern in a graceful arc towards me. It fell into the cup of my palms, soft and slightly warm. I was aware of the boys cheering. One by one, Achilles caught the remaining fruits, returned them to the table with a performer’s flourish. Except for the last, which he ate, the dark flesh parting to pink seeds under his teeth. The fruit was perfectly ripe, the juice brimming. Without thinking, I brought the one he had thrown me to my lips. Its burst of grainy sweetness filled my mouth; the skin was downy on my tongue. I had loved figs, once.”

“All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships. When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion’s sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else. They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up. See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things--small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings--and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships. See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis. For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns. Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first. There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.”