Mythic Fiction Quotes

It happened so quickly. One minute I was plucking the flower, and the next I was in his chariot immersed in darkness. I struggled to wrench myself free from his grasp and run away. I twisted as far as I could, hoping to see mother chasing after me. But ahead of me, behind me, on either side of me, everywhere I looked, all I could see was darkness. ~ Tamara Agha-Jaffar

Years ago, when I was about to go on a book tour for Someplace to Be Flying, my editor at the time Terri Windling and I sat down to figure out what to call what I was writing for the interviews that were to come. Terri came up with the term mythic fiction and I think that sums it up perfectly. There are almost invariably mythic elements in my fiction (as well as bits of folk and faerie lore) and the term doesn't lock me into writing only in an urban setting since many of my stories take place in rural areas. It never caught on, but when I don't describe what I do as simply fiction, I'll go with mythic fiction. ~ Charles De Lint

Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn't trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he'd been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill.
I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class...
"Stories aren't real," he told me shortly. "They don't feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding 'family' in the nearest gang."
Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. "Write down the names of some books," she said. "Maybe we'll read them."
I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint – for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young live ~ Terri Windling

You cruel, hard-hearted gods!" I flung the goblet in his direction. Hermes barely had time to dart out of its way before it hit the wall and shattered to small pieces. "You're all the same! Hsst! Jealous! Vindictive! That's what you are! You allow yourselves to take pleasure with any mortal you wish. Let a goddess do the same. Let a goddess choose a mortal for her lover, and you set off in a fury of revenge against her as if her actions are an affront to you. And all the while, you male gods allow yourselves all kinds of liberties you deny to us females. ~ Tamara Agha-Jaffar

[T]he incomparable Diana Wynne Jones, one of the finest mythic fiction writers of our age, who left us too early (due to cancer) two days ago. I'm so grateful to her for the extraordinary books she has left behind, which have inspired a whole generation of younger writers. She was writing brilliant YA fantasy before the genre (as we know it now) even existed; she was writing enchanting "wizard school" books long before Harry Potter was a gleam in Rowling's eye; and her knowledge of how to weave mythic/folkloric themes into contemporary fiction was second to no one's. Diana will be terribly missed, but through her magical stories, her light will stay on. ~ Terri Windling

Wait," she says, reaching for his phone again, "are you watching videos of Justin Trudeau speaking French again?"
"That's not a thing I do!"
"That is a thing I have caught you doing at least twice since you met him at the state dinner last year, so yeah, it is," she says. Alex flips her off. "Wait, oh my God, is it fan fiction about yourself? And you didn't invite me? Who do they have you boning now? Did you read the one I sent you with Macron? I died."
"If you don't stop, I'm gonna call Taylor Swift and tell her you changed your mind and want to go to her Fourth of July party after all. ~ Casey McQuiston

Fiction though it is a fiction, should be written in a way that it feels like a reality, a reality every reader willingly or sometimes unwillingly goes through, until the reader finishes reading and sometimes even after that. ~ Arti Honrao

In some ways, I think it's the closest that we come to the truth - is in the form of fiction. ~ Laila Lalami

I like animal sidekicks. They seem to be a pretty cool trope of post-apocalyptic fiction - just because if you're going to have this lone protagonist, they're going to need someone to talk to. Dogs are overused, and cats are dumb. So that leaves monkeys. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation…our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys ~ Leslie Fielder

To be loved, is to be immortal. ~ Lynette Ferreira

Is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one? ~ Rick Bass

The craving to touch her is like an itch I can't scratch. ~ Siobhan Davis

An inseparable complement to the exoticism in his stories is the erudition, the bits of specialized knowledge, usually literary, but also philological, historical, philosophical, or theological. This knowledge, which borders on but never oversteps the bounds of pedantry, is quite freely flaunted. But the point is not to show off Borges's wide acquaintance with different cultures. Rather, it is a key element in his creative strategy, the aim of which was to imbue his stories with a certain colorfulness, to endow them with an atmosphere all their own. In other words Borges's learning by his use of exotic settings and characters fulfills an exclusively literary function, which, in twisting the erudition around and making it sometimes decorative, sometimes symbolic, subordinates it to the task at hand. In this way Borges's theology, philosophy, linguistics and so forth, lose their original character, take on the quality of fiction, and, becoming part and parcel of a literary fantasy, are turned into literature. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa

Our soul ties were beyond toxic."
~Love is respect ♥~ ~ Charlena E. Jackson

The writer:
a spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the information across the border, back into death. Then he can be given a mythic personality: 'he spent time among us, betrayed us, and took the material across the border. ~ Paul Bowles

Jungle sex," I panted.
"Let's go swimming," Shade said at the same time.
We stared at each other. He grinned like a loon. I blinked and then grinned also.
"I like the way you thing, starshine. ~ Amanda Bouchet

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out. ~ Jeanette Winterson

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die. ~ Kevin J. Anderson

I've no time to wait on your feminine games. We leave now." In true caveman style, he upended her over his shoulder despite her squealed, "Don't you dare."
"Oh, stuff it. A deal is a deal. I told you I needed your help. You agreed so long as we escaped. Congratulations. We're escaping. Now, make it good for the cameras, would you? I've got a reputation to create. ~ Eve Langlais

No, look, there's a blue box. It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It can go anywhere in time and space and sometimes even where it's meant to go. And when it turns up, there's a bloke in it called The Doctor and there will be stuff wrong and he will do his best to sort it out and he will probably succeed 'cause he's awesome. Now sit down, shut up, and watch 'Blink'. ~ Neil Gaiman

One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did. ~ Nancy Horan

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. ~ Jessamyn West

Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own, in order to investigate by way of pleasurable thought-experiments how things might be done differently. ~ Brian Stableford

She hadn't expected the intamacy of his voice in her head. It had a smoothness to it that gave way now and then to gravel. ~ Christine Feehan

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day
a way of relating. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Perhaps Zeus was king, but I was Spartan, a princess twice over, and queen of Athens besides. I knew my duty. And I would rule my own fate. ~ Amalia Carosella

As a man writes his fiction, his fiction is writing him. We can never change ourselves back into what we were, any more than I can change these printed words. So we have to be careful about what we write. ~ Ross Macdonald

As sneakily addictive as a game of Pong (which was named, we're told, after the narrator's dad), this zany zip-line of a novel takes the piss out of the Asian-American 'good immigrant' story. Full of charming antiheroes making comically bad choices, the story dazzles us with its absurdity, which makes its eventual wisdom--about lineage, ethnicity, and the meaning of family--all the more wonderfully surprising. ~ Michael Lowenthal

Every kid I meet who's a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it's the one place where you can do the forbidden. ~ Dorothy Allison

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe. ~ P.D. James

I fell asleep that night in the arms of a killer. I'd never slept better. ~ T.M. Frazier

Fiction always surpasses reality but reality is always richer than fiction. ~ Javier Cercas

You can't undo the past, but you can learn from it. ~ Karen Witemeyer

In my life I haven't done anything worth writing about, but that's OK. That's why I write fiction. ~ Jarod Kintz

the fundamentally paradoxical ways that our very subjectivities are constituted: as cultural scripts, as texts written before us as us. It is confusing being a novel, a piece of fiction that considers itself a simple fact. ~ Whitley Strieber

Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.' - Senor Sempere. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon