True myths may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blonde Hero-really look-and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up

Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.