Northrop Frye Quotes

Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same per...

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the me...

So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and...

(U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting ...

Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy sh...

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) i...

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

The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with w...

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

Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation…

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he...

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any wri...

The bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mi...

Americans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it. I know no country where accountants have a...

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

For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is...

A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study ...

Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the...

We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States but then the Americans are be...

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

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

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

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

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

Wisdom is the central form which gives meaning and position to all the facts which are acquired by k...

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slip...

Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to i...

I feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I've felt that it was really...