Richard Holloway Quotes

The truth of a myth...is not in its words but its patterns.

A myth is something that never was but that is always happening.

The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life.

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.

Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.

Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.

Myth is the nothing that is all.

The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise.

In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next.

What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.

For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

Myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible.

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.

He who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.

The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

The claim that myth is always a narrative spin-off of ritual; the claim that myth is the projection of human anxieties onto a cosmological scrim; the claim that myths are invented to give sanction to human predilections and institutions... These are ways of trivializing a mode of thought that has served humanity well for a very long time.

Nature, or the world, or reality, is what mythology is all about.