Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world. — Northrop Frye Blake Copy Share Image
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book. — Northrop Frye Book Copy Share Image
Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult. — Northrop Frye Books Copy Share Image
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats. — Northrop Frye Advertising 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 disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology. — Northrop Frye Core 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
“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
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find… — Northrop Frye Aim 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 Activity 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 Areas 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
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
“The only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is… — Northrop Frye Accuracy 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 Art Copy Share Image
In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its… — Northrop Frye Aim Copy Share Image
The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle… — Northrop Frye Aliens Copy Share Image
Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure;… — Northrop Frye Adventure 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 Believe Copy Share Image
Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a… — Northrop Frye Apocalypse 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… — Northrop Frye Amor Copy Share Image
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 Bigger Copy Share Image
Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell… — Northrop Frye Amount Copy Share Image
Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it… — Northrop Frye Accepting Copy Share Image
“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 History 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 Firsts 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 All kinds 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
