You don't ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean. You enjoy it.

[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

The Navajo have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. The Navajo say, 'Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I'm on the pollen path.'

The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.

The unfolding through time of all things from one is the simple message, finally, of every one of the creation myths reproduced in the pages of these volumes-including that of our contemporary biological view, which becomes an effective mythic image the moment we recognize its own inner mystery. By the same magic, every god that is dead can be conjured again to life, as any fragment of rock from a hillside, set respectfully in a garden, will arrest the eye.

The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations.