"I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?"
— John Lennon

"I said hello to the poodle.
-The Lightning Thief"
— Rick Riordan

"[The Bible] has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies."
— Mark Twain

"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
— Albert Camus

"Don't feel bad, I'm usually about to die."
— Rick Riordan (The Battle of the Labyrinth)

"One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory; you must remember this."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos."
— Edgar Allan Poe (Ligeia)

"Lady, I was gonna cut you some slack, 'cause you're a major mythological figure...but now you've just gone nuts!"
— Mike Mignola (Hellboy Volume 2: Wake the Devil)

"You can't doubt so much, Psyche

- Eros
Psyche in a Dress
"
— Francesca Lia Block

"Mythology is ancient psychology and psychology is recent mythology."
— cf. Hillman

"Apollo, sacred guard of earth's true core, Whence first came frenzied, wild prophetic word..."
— Cicero

"Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology."
— Michael Shermer

"This is a passion story: my passion, his, ours — yours."
— Elizabeth Cunningham (The Passion of Mary Magdalen: A Novel)

"But a myth, to speak plainly, to me is like a menu in a fancy French restaurant: glamorous, complicated camouflage for a fact you wouldn't otherwise swallow, like maybe lima beans."
— William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist)

"Time, which sees all things, has found you out."
— Sophocles Oedipus The King

"It wasn't for a woman's backside that I took on this ordeal!"
— Cúchulainn (Thomas Kinsella, translator) (The Táin)

"The vampire was real. It was only that his true story had never been told."
— Richard Matheson (I Am Legend)

"‘Rest in Peace?’ Why that phrase? That’s the most ridiculous phrase I’ve ever heard! You die, and they say ‘Rest in Peace!’ …Why would one need to ‘rest’ when they’re dead?! I spent thousands of years of world history resting. While Agamemnon was leading his ships to Troy, I was resting. While Ovid was seducing women at the chariot races, I was resting. While Jeanne d’Arc was hallucinating, I was resting. I wait until airplanes are scuttling across the sky to burst out onto the scene, and I’m only going to be here for a short while, so when I die, I certainly won’t need to rest again! Not while more adventures of the same kind are going on."
— Roman Payne (Rooftop Soliloquy)

"‘Rest in Peace?’ Why that phrase? That’s the most ridiculous phrase I’ve ever heard! You die, and they say ‘Rest in Peace!’ …Why would one need to ‘rest’ when they’re dead?! I spent thousands of years of world history resting. While Agamemnon was leading his ships to Troy, I was resting. While Ovid was seducing women at the chariot races, I was resting. While Jeanne d’Arc was hallucinating, I was resting. I wait until airplanes are scuttling across the sky to burst out onto the scene, and I’m only going to be here for a short while, so when I die, I certainly won’t need to rest again! Not while more adventures of the same kind are going on!"
— Roman Payne (Rooftop Soliloquy)

"Sky was the first god. Robert knew that there was only one God and he had a Son who was also God, but there were gods who had vanished: the gods of thunder, of fire, of the wide oceans of the earth."
— Arthur Slade (Dust)

"A too often forgotten truth is that you can live through actual events of history and completely miss the underlying reality of what's going. What history misses, the myth clearly expresses. The myth in the hands of a genius give us a clear picture of the inner import of life itself."
— Tom Harpur (The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light)

"I should acquaint the reader with the basic principles of the mythology I adhered to then. I believed . . . that inanimate objects were no less fallible than people. They, too, could be forgetful. And, if you had enough patience, you could catch them by surprise."
— Stanislaw Lem (Highcastle)

"Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology."
— Bryan Sykes (Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland)

"Myths have a very long memory."
— Bryan Sykes (Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland)

""To speak [about mythic history] promiscuously or publicly may also be perilous, since its stories often remain imbued with the powerful forces that originally created the world and can still destroy it. Sometimes such reticence actually issues from consideration for the welfare of those not in the know.""
— Peter Nabokov

"To speak [about mythic history] promiscuously or publicly may also be perilous, since its stories often remain imbued with the powerful forces that originally created the world and can still destroy it. Sometimes such reticence actually issues from consideration for the welfare of those not in the know."
— Peter Nabokov

"To speak [about mythic history] promiscuously or publicly may also be perilous, since its stories often remain imbued with the powerful forces that originally created the world and can still destroy it. Sometimes such reticence actually issues from consideration for the welfare of those not in the know."
— Peter Nabokov