I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of… — Northrop Frye 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 Copy Share Image
Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature. — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination. — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read,… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
“We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak… — 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 Copy Share Image
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that. — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
“What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life.… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not… — Northrop Frye 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 Copy Share Image
Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like,… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or… — 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 Copy Share Image
“I feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I've felt that it was really a part of… — Northrop Frye 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 Copy Share Image
In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art… — Northrop Frye 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 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 Copy Share Image
I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is… — 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 in the… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
“The only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death… — Northrop Frye 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. Art, like… — Northrop Frye 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 the range… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind. — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
“Tendintele autoritate ale conservatorismului trebuie corectate prin mituri ale libertatii, in vreme ce un simt conservator al ordinii trebuie sa tempereze tendintele liberalismului spre… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
“The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
