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

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

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

[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.