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List of Northrop Frye Quotes

Explore our hand-picked selection of 108 inspiring quotes by Northrop Frye.

About Northrop Frye

  • Born: July 14, 1912
  • Died: January 23, 1991
  • Occupation: Literary Critic
    • Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. we have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.
    Fall Together Special
    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.
    Country Moral Making Money
    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.
    Art What If Criticism
    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.
    Religion Atheism Infinity
    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 gulf of st. lawrence, where five canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible... to enter canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.
    Travel Past Europe
    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.
    Book May Old Testament
    A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. he cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.
    Believe People Suffering
    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 can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.
    Writing People Giving
    The entire bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a u-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of genesis and gets them back at the end of revelation.
    Men Water Of Life Tree
    The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about newton's time most people took the "up" of heaven and the "down" of hell to be more or less descriptive.
    People Heaven Cosmos
    The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
    Jobs Two Mind
    The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.
    Focus Mind Operations
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