“All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place.”

“[Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood to it; but a myth is a story of a certain kind. The myths of a culture are those stories it takes seriously—the ones that are thought to be a key to its identity.”

“[A]nother thing about myths: they gather in and circumscribe their target audience. They make a collection into a collective.”

“The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.”

“In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of myth.”

“Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time. ”

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”