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" In their purest form myths, not unlike tragedy, are perhaps the most important moment in the troubled history of Mexican civilization. The cement of dreams, the architecture of language, made of images and rhythms which respond to and harmonize with each other through time and space, their wisdom is not of that which can be measured on the scale of the everyday. They are concurrently religion, ritual, belief, phantasmagoria, and the primary affirmation of a human coherence, the coagulating strength of language against the anguish of death and the certainty of nothingness. Myths express life, despite the promise of destruction, of the weight of the inevitable. They are without any doubt the most durable monuments of men, in America as in the ancient world. "
― J.M.G. Le Clézio , The Mexican Dream, or The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations
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" Among the Inca, as among the Aztec, dreams were considered to be true voyages of the soul outside the body, during which men could know the future and receive divine warnings . . . Dreams and visions affirmed a relationship between the divinity and man which was absolutely contrary to the strongly hierarchical structures of the Church of the first Christian missionaries. Shamanic ecstasy signified the individuality of faith, revelation, and immediate relationship with the forces of the beyond. It was upon that ecstatic relationship with the divine world that the identity of the barbarian peoples was built, where each man could, thanks to the gift of his dreams, merge into the other world. "
― J.M.G. Le Clézio , The Mexican Dream, or The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations
