“But there are neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles….
The duende’s arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm.”

— Federico Garcia Lorca, “Play and Theory of the Duende”

“And anyway, I thought, sipping my home-made wine and squinting up at the night sky for sputniks, Mammy had told me there were as many different beliefs as there were scattered stars. And I knew the stars were without number.”

— Graham Joyce, The Limits of Enchantment

“This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being: if he commits it and speaks with his being the basic word to the form that appears, then the creative power is released and the work comes into being.”

– Martin Buber, I and Thou, p. 60

“Slight is the price
Of an act of faith in the numinous strength
Of what has been grounded in being:
Believed in as long as time.”

– Euripides, “The Bacchae,” lines 894-897

“We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.”

— Ray Bradbury

“And in turn the Heron asks, with shocking clarity as it flies from right to left and left to right: why can’t our job here on earth be simply to inspire each other?”

— Graham Joyce, August 2014, grahamjoyce.co.uk

“Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.”

–Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, page 4

“But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.”

— Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, page 12

“Myths, or mythic moves, open spaces. Rational accounts limit them. This is necessary. Both are necessary.”

– Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel, p 9

“Reason and understanding must unite with unreason and magic.”

– Claire Dunne, “Carl Jung’s Red Book,” Parabola, 35:2

“Image-making is a via regia, a royal road to soul-making. The making of soul-stuff calls for dreaming, fantasying, imagining. To live psychologically means to imagine things…”

– James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p 23