Northrop Frye Quotes
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.
Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.
We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.
The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.
What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.
The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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 what the people around him are writing.
The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.
I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.
For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.
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.
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.
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.
Americans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it. I know no country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.
Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.
Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation…
(U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.