“(U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of… — Northrop Frye Human life Copy Share Image
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like — Northrop Frye Books Copy Share Image
Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination. — Northrop Frye Books Copy Share Image
The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death. — Northrop Frye Death Copy Share Image
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that. — Northrop Frye Books Copy Share Image
“For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.” — Northrop Frye Bible Copy Share Image
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology. — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its… — Northrop Frye Chess Copy Share Image
Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but… — Northrop Frye Blue Copy Share Image
A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and… — Northrop Frye Art Copy Share Image
Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature.… — Northrop Frye Art Copy Share Image
We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by… — Northrop Frye American culture Copy Share Image
Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, recognizes that it is man's destiny to unite and not… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about Newton's time… — Northrop Frye Astronomy Copy Share Image
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions. — Northrop Frye Anxiety Copy Share Image
The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not… — Northrop Frye Books Copy Share Image
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity. — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
“It is impossible to think of an ideal human life except as an alternation of individual and social life, as equally a… — Northrop Frye Belonging Copy Share Image
It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse. — Northrop Frye Apocalypse Copy Share Image
The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in… — Northrop Frye Ancient Copy Share Image
The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them. — Northrop Frye Imagination Copy Share Image
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens. — Northrop Frye Anything goes Copy Share Image
Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds. — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac… — Northrop Frye Allusion Copy Share Image
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it. — Northrop Frye Civilization Copy Share Image
Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics. — Northrop Frye Culture Copy Share Image
We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life. — Northrop Frye Education Copy Share Image
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed… — Northrop Frye Consoling Copy Share Image
“Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and… — Northrop Frye Books Copy Share Image
Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left… — Northrop Frye Canada Copy Share Image
One of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance... Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use… — Northrop Frye Action Copy Share Image
For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him… — Northrop Frye Books Copy Share Image
Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the… — Northrop Frye Hills Copy Share Image
What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases… — Northrop Frye Art Copy Share Image
