Northrop Frye

Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.

— Northrop Frye

Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.

— Northrop Frye

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

— Northrop Frye

Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.

— Northrop Frye

Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.

— Northrop Frye

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

— Northrop Frye

[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.

— Northrop Frye

The book is the world's most patient medium.

— Northrop Frye

A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are…

— Northrop Frye

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

— Northrop Frye

The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything…

— Northrop Frye

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs…

— Northrop Frye

One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.

— Northrop Frye

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

Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and…

— Northrop Frye

The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms…

— Northrop Frye

“Wisdom is the central form which gives meaning and position to all the facts which are acquired by knowledge, the digestion and…

— Northrop Frye

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art…

— Northrop Frye

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what…

— Northrop Frye

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

Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its…

— Northrop Frye

The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or…

— Northrop Frye

We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the…

— Northrop Frye

I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of…

— Northrop Frye

“It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to…

— Northrop Frye

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it…

— Northrop Frye

Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell…

— Northrop Frye

Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a…

— Northrop Frye

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak…

— Northrop Frye

It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought,…

— Northrop Frye

Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to…

— Northrop Frye

“Tendintele autoritate ale conservatorismului trebuie corectate prin mituri ale libertatii, in vreme ce un simt conservator al ordinii trebuie sa tempereze tendintele…

— Northrop Frye

“The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of…

— Northrop Frye

“Art is neither good nor bad, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both, and any attempt to align it with…

— Northrop Frye

“So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be…

— Northrop Frye

War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.

— Northrop Frye

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

— Northrop Frye

Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.

— Northrop Frye

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

— Northrop Frye

Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.

— Northrop Frye