If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

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Myth

Diana Wynne Jones's quotes

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This does make me very very careful, particularly in the second draft, to get it right, because you do feel that somebody in the future who may be extremely important for everybody, is going to have me behind them, and this is a responsibility, a huge one.

Diana Wynne Jones

And indeed if you think you're a genius at something, what you achieve is very much according to your expectations; if you think you're no good, you're not going to get anywhere.

Diana Wynne Jones

I think one of things is that all fantasy it seems to me works the way your brain basically works. This is perhaps a startling concept, but I think it's true.

Diana Wynne Jones

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

Diana Wynne Jones

It's a lucky child that knows that they're a genius, unaimed and all that.

Diana Wynne Jones

I do feel very strongly that this is one of the things which people need encouragement to sort out, because I have this very strong feeling that everybody is probably a genius at something, it's just a question of finding this.

Diana Wynne Jones

I find it just simply takes me right back to those times, and I really can't take it, I don't want to, I mean, why should I face up to it? What good does it do me? I know it happened, and that's it.

Diana Wynne Jones

I mean one of the things about being alone is that you've no people to define yourself off, I mean, people are like all-round mirrors, because let's face it, we don't often see ourselves all round in a mirror anyway, do we.

Diana Wynne Jones

Actually, in the wild, we'd be the only person that we wouldn't recognize, if you think about it.

Diana Wynne Jones

It seems to me that humour is everybody's way of keeping sane and standing off from the situations so that they can see it intellectually, as well as emotionally, and I don't know whether you've noticed, but if somebody tells a joke, it's nearly always a mini fantasy.

Diana Wynne Jones

Mainly as sort of blueprints for dealing with most of the adults in their lives, to some extent with their fellows. It is this notion of aiming high and there's always hope, aim low and you might as well stop now.

Diana Wynne Jones

This is ridiculous, I mean, wholly ridiculous. It never did any child any harm to have something that was a tiny bit above them anyway, and I claim that anyone who can follow Doctor Who can follow absolutely anything.

Diana Wynne Jones

Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.

Diana Wynne Jones

I always looked for a man to rescue me and bring me happiness. I bought into that myth, of course, and looked for my own Prince Charming.

Linda Evans

There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

Hannes Alfven

I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.

John Boorman

Something fundamental about the myth of the Jew has resurfaced.

Steven T. Katz

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

Albert Camus

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.

Robert Heller

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

Michael Shermer

Postmodernists believe that truth is myth, and myth, truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It used to be called psychosis.

Brad Holland

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

Diane Wakoski

It took some time to gather the research and develop it into the storyline, and to finally finish an origin myth poem that I had been working on for twenty years.

Jean M. Auel

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Robert Fulghum

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

Robert Penn Warren

You know why we're stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don't let themselves feel things.

Janis Joplin

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Myth is supposed to bring us together, but fantasy alienates us.

Dustin Hoffman

Nothing will see us through the age we're entering but high consciousness, and that comes hard. We don't have a good, modern myth yet, and we need one.

Robert Johnson

From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.

Leon Trotsky

There is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth, and that should be redressed.

Edward Zwick

Today's Communism can survive only if it abandons the myth of an infallible party, if it continues to think, and if it becomes democratic.

Friedrich Durrenmatt

I believe that global warming is a myth. And so, therefore, I have no conscience problems at all and I'm going to buy a Suburban next time.

Jerry Falwell

As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.

James Hillman

The Roswell incident, for instance, had over three hundred witnesses - some describing the bodies, some the craft, some the military procedures. Were they all perpetuating their own lives in a myth?

Dwight Schultz

Diana Wynne Jones

Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'

Paul McCartney

In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

Brooks Atkinson

There was that feminist myth that we can do everything. I don't think you can.

Jessica Lange

The standardized American is largely a myth created not least by Americans themselves.

Irwin Edman

And I feel that we in our society should not be held by any such myth; that we should do everything we can to gain a delight and joy in our society with all the available parts of the palette.

Minoru Yamasaki

Taste is more to do with manners than appearances. Taste is both myth and reality; it is not a style.

Stephen Bayley

To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.

Hannes Alfven

It struck me that what I'd heard about certain celebrities was true: they had It, whatever the hell It was. Star power isn't a myth; it is tangible and forceful.

Michael Bergin

If you're going to be a myth or want to be a myth, you'd better die young.

Alma Guillermoprieto

It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.

Barry Commoner

I grew up under Thatcher. I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless. Then gradually over the years it occurred to me that this was actually a very convenient myth for the state.

Thom Yorke

Every country that has experimented with women in actual combat has abandoned the idea, and the notion that Israel uses women in combat is a feminist myth.

Phyllis Schlafly