Northrop Frye Quotes

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

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.

Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.

The bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.

We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.

It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.

Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.

Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.

We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.

The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.

My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .

Americans like to make money, Canadians like to count it.

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

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

We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.

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 Williams.

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 its inner mental processes alone.

Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.

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

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 last judgement of mankind.

The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.

The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.

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 has hit is the didactic.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.

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

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

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

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

I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.

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.

Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.

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

Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.

Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

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