myth

He would gaze at her with intrigued longan seed eyes.

The first time she saw the boy across the classroom, Ah Lee knew she was in love because she tasted durian on her tongue.

I can speak four dialects, but none of them is fairy language.

I thought: if I die, I hope I get reincarnated into a mosquito so I can bite that fucker kau-kau.

Other dragons are bastards. I moved out of my mother's cave after my mother tried to rip my guts out.Granted, I had tried to steal her Tiara of Clairvoyance.

Now, I pray you, cast yourself into a different world, a different trail of thought; step into a place where dragons live and breathe, where they are as real in touch and voice as you or I. Where they face the same extinction every day that they have suffered in our world: the extinction of myth . . . yet where they battle every moment to fend off such a fate for another day . . .

How should we be able to forget those myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value

Like the end, the myth of the beginning overlaps the cycle of birth and death, unfolding like a Möbius strip in ceaseless continuum, which is the paradox that sits above and beyond intellectual explanation in the realm where empirical logic halts.

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

It is the mythic experience, the mythic imagination that opens, reveals depth and mystery, which places the human in the context of the nonhuman, and so, forces retreat, humility, and awe, in the presence of spaces beyond our will.

As you set out on your journey to Ithaca,pray that your journey be a long one,filled with adventure, filled with discovery.Laestrygonians and Cyclopes,the angry Poseidon--do not fear them:you'll never find such things on your wayunless your sight is set high, unless a rareexcitement stirs your spirit and your body.The Laestrygonians and Cyclopes,the savage Poseidon--you won't meet themso long as you do not admit them to your soul,as long as your soul does not set them before you.Pray that your road is a long one.May there be many summer morningswhen with what pleasure, with what joy,you enter harbors never seen before.May you stop at Phoenician stations of trade to buy fine things,mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,and voluptuous perfumes of every kind--buy as many voluptuous perfumes as you can.And may you go to many Egyptian citiesto learn and learn from those who know.Always keep Ithaca in your mind.You are destined to arrive there.But don't hurry your journey at all.Far better if it takes many years,and if you are old when you anchor at the island,rich with all you have gained on the way,not expecting that Ithaca will give you wealth.Ithaca has given you a beautiful journey.Without her you would never have set out.She has no more left to give you.And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not mocked you.As wise as you have become, so filled with experience,you will have understood what these Ithacas signify.

Money talks, I record.

What wonder will I accomplish today? And how will it tie in to tomorrow and tomorrow, so that I may live as the hero I want to be? And today how will I seek and find the opportunity that scares me? An opportunity that has me harness some elements within that I may cross over the bridge into the other side of my existence; the one that__ begging to be unsettled, that greets the morning before the sun with a ferocious will to rise up, to inspire, to create laughter and tears from the uncovering of the magical self and the relief that I have given in to the excitingly scary, omega point pull to evolve.

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.

...there is a myth called objective reality - we think an impersonal world exists apart from us - it doesn't - it needs us to be ...

I think of myth and magic as the hieroglyphics of the human psyche. They are a special language that circumvents conscious thought and goes straight to the subconscious. Non-fiction uses the medium of information. It tells us what we need to know. Science fiction primarily uses the medium of physics and mathematics. It tells us how things work, or could work. Horror taps into the darker imagery of the psychology, telling us what we should fear. Fantasy, magic and myth, however, tap into the spiritual potential of the human life. Their medium is symbolism, truth made manifest in word pictures, and they tell us what things mean on a deep, internal level. I have always been a meaning-maker. I have always been someone who strives to make sense of everything and perhaps that is where my life as a storyteller first began. Life doesn't always make sense, but story must. And so I write stories, and the world comes right again.

Nothing is more difficult than competing with myth