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
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
Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience… — 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
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
The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent,… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular… — Northrop Frye Copy Share Image
The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and… — 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 Copy Share Image
Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what… — 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
