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Mythology Quotes


"There are countless circles of hell, believers never penetrate the ninth circle."


"The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her."


"In a way, it's nice to know that there are Greek gods out there, because you have somebody to blame when things go wrong. For instance, when you're walking away from a bus that's just been attacked by monster hags and blown up by lightning, and it's raining on top of everything else, most people might think that's just really bad luck; when you're a half-blood, you understand that some devine force is really trying to mess up your day."


"Myths aren't fairy tales or legends-they're an honest attempt to explain mysteries..."


"At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it."


"I was trying to do you a favor, you silly woman. A few more hours in the fire, and your baby boy would have been immortal! He would've grown into a fine young god and brought you eternal honor. Now you've ruined the magic. He will simply be human-a great hero, yes, strong and tall, but doomed to a mortal life. He will only be Demophoon, when he could have been Fully Phoon! Phoon the Great!"


"It was sometimes said that the grey-and-black mountain range which ran like a spine north to south down that part of Faerie had once been a giant, who grew so huge and so heavy that, one day, worn out from the sheer effort of moving and living, he had stretched out on the plain and fallen into a sleep so profound that centuries passed between heartbeats."


"Think of every fairy-tale villainess you've ever heard of. Think of the wicked witches, the evil queens, the mad enchantresses. Think of the alluring sirens, the hungry ogresses, the savage she-beasts. Think of them and remember that somewhere, sometime, they've all been real."


"My Lasher is powerful beyond yourdreams of a daimon, and he has learnt much.''Learned,' I repeated in amazement. 'How learned, Deborah, for he is merely a spirit, and they areforever foolish and therein lies the danger, that in granting our wishes they do not understand thecomplexity of them, and thereby prove our undoing. There are a thousand tales that prove it. Has this nothappened? How so do you say learned?"


"A geas was a contract with the goddess of Fate. Sometimes one was born indentured, other times it was bestowed upon one as a curse. Because if one did not fulfill the terms of one's geas, one died. It was old magic, the magic of the gods, spoken in the tongues of those who controlled the dragons-and it was supposed to be extinct."


"Where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom* *Made it upand extrapolated from associated sources** **had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too."


"Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?"


"In so-called primitive societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana."


"If you look at it from any other side, it looks like a pile of enormous deer droppings, but Chiron wouldn't let us call the place the Poop Pile, especially after it had been named for Zeus, who doesn't have much of a sense of humor."


"Mythologically speaking, if there's anything I hate worse than trios of old ladies, it's bulls. Last summer, I fought the Minotaur on top of Half-Blood Hill. This time what I saw up there was even worse: two bulls. And not just regular bulls - bronze ones the size of elephants. And even that wasn't bad enough. Naturally they had to breathe fire, too."


"Every time the sky cries, it is because an angel has died... Lucifer started a war in Heaven, and it persists even now. So if God cannot keep his angels under control, what makes you believe that he can keep humanity under control?"


"As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star."


"Yet at the last Beren was slain by the Wolf that came from the gates of Angband, and he died in the arms of TinAoviel. But she chose mortality, and to die from the world, so that she might follow him; and it is sung that they met again beyond the Sundering Seas, and after a brief time walking alive once more in the green woods, together they passed, long ago, beyond the confines of this world. So it is that LAothien TinAoviel alone of the Elf-kindred has died indeed and left the world, and they have lost her whom they most loved."


"Those movies... ridiculously inaccurate. The real gods of Asgard - Thor, Loki, Odin, and the rest - are much more powerful, much more terrifying than anything Hollywood could concoct."


"Mythology and religion are relevant and remarkable, as they each represent imaginative truths " projections of human beings innermost desires " intermixed with fragments of factual reality."


"There is an old legend that somewhere in the world every man has his double."


"The constellation she's named after tells the story of a princess, who was shackled to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster--punishment for her mother Casseopeia, who had bragged to Poseidon about her own beauty. Perseus, flying by, fell in love with Andromeda and saved her. In the sky, she's pictured with her arms outstretched and her hands chained."


"Annabeth frowned. "That doesn't make sense. But why were you visiting --" Her eyes widened. "Hermes said you bear the curse of Achilles. Hestia said the same thing. Did you . . . did you bathe in the River Styx?""Don't change the subject.""Percy! Did you or not?""Um . . .maybe a little."


"I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. Also many of the older legends are purely 'mythological', and nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Numenor and the flight of Elendil."


"Then Tak looked upon the stone and it was trying to come alive, and Tak smiled, and wrote All things strive.And for the service the stone had given, he fashioned it into the first Troll, and delighted in the life that came unbidden."


"The cave floor rumbled. A large stone emerged from the dirt-a smooth, oval rock exactly the same size and weight as a baby god... She wrapped the stone in swaddling clothes and gave the real baby Zeus to the nymphs to take care of... She marched right up to King Cannibal and shouted, "This is the best baby yet! A fine little boy named, uh, Rocky!"


"The faery lords are immortal. Those who have songs ballads and stories written about them never die. Belief worship imagination we were born of the dreams and fears of mortals and if we are remembered even in some small way we will always exist."
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