Best Northrop Frye Quotes
- Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world. Blake
- There is a curious law of art...that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose… Act
- The book is the world's most patient medium. Book
- Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic. Begins
- In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens. Anything Goes
- Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep. Eat
- The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment. Belongs
- The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee… Ancient
- Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to… Boastful
- A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means… Desire
- For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he… Belong
- Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new… Art
- It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling… All
- Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature. Diversified
- There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language. Degrade
- Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he… Aim
- Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so. Any
- Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels. Copying
- The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the… Alien
- We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human… Alien
- Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status. Accountants
- The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book. Book
- It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as… Been
- A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave… Alone
- The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I… Arguing