If you haven't got an excremental vision you have no business setting up as a major satirist. (2:578-9) - Northrop Frye

[L]iterature not only leads us toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don't like and want to get away from...We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us. ...Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.

There's something in all of us that wants to drift toward a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we use words, we're either righting against this tendency or giving in to it. When we fight against it, we're taking the side of genuine and permanent human civilization.

Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.