This book by David Loy will get a fuller treatment later. It was a delight to read, and it requires further digestion. However, one thing makes it quite fun: its numerous quotes spread throughout the text. Delicious little bits of thought. I've written some of my favorites for your delectation. (However, don't let these substitute for reading the book!)
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
Muriel Rukeheyser
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Greek polis was formed by warriors coming back from the Trojan Wars. They needed a place to tell their stories, because it was only in the stories that they achieved immortality. Democracy was created to make the world safe for stories.
Ernest Becker
Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.
Phillip K. Dick
No dharma has ever been taught by a buddha to anyone, anywhere.
Nagarjuna
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension. In traditional bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced; every place had its legend and its own identity . . . . What endured was the mythic landscape, providing escape and inspiration.
R.K. Foster
Just as the flower is made of non-flower elements, the self is made only of non-self elements.
Thich Nhat Hanh
The sense of the world must be outside the world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Hannah Arendt
Myth is not entertainment, but rather the crystallization of experience, and far from being escapist literature, fantasy is an intensification of reality.
Alan Garner
What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless other cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, or a mythic home, the mythic womb?
Nietzsche
Theology is a branch of fantastic literature.
Jorge Luis Borges
Fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factural, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living.
Ursula K. LeGuin
One does not refute symbols; one deciphers them.
Henri Corbin
She kept asking if the stories were true.
I kept asking her if it mattered.
We finally gave up.
She was looking for a place to stand
& I wanted a place to fly.
Brian Anderson
The only secure truth men have is that which they themselves create and dramatize; to live is to play at the meaning of life.
Ernest Becker
We accept reality easily, perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
Jorge Luis Borges
Our truth consists of illusions that we have forgotten are illusions.
Nietzsche
I plan on more to come!
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