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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 by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question Who am I? than by some such riddle as Where is here?

Northrop Frye

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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
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Canadian
Less
Profoundly
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Confronts
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More quotes by Northrop Frye

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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
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Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
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I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye
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Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.
Northrop Frye
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Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
Northrop Frye
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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Northrop Frye
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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
Northrop Frye
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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye