Adrienne Mayor Quotes

Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

Old stories often turn out to be true.

As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic.

They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I'm interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women's stories are all kind of combined.

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

Stories always seem to get better with age.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

Combine two words, Myth and History. What do you get? Mystery.

When our ancestors crouched about the camp fire at night, they told each other tales of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels, to hold back the terrors of the night. Such tales comforted and entertained, diverted and educated those who listened, and helped shape their sense of the world and their place in it.

Mythology works... because Indians have been bred on myths.

There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do.

The bearers of fables are very welcome.

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.

Every culture has their myths that people are aware of and share.

Human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order.

Myths and legends die hard in America.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

In the native literatures of North America there aren't any novels. Instead, the major genre is myth. And myths are stories that are fundamentally about the world, not about human individuals. A myth needn't include any humans at all. If it does include them, they're usually minor characters - imaginary humans sent out like scouts to report back on what's happening in the mythworld, but not central participants in the action.

The great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.

The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it's there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.