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The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]

Northrop Frye

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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
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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.
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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.
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No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself
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My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
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The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
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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.
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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
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We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
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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.
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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
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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.
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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.
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Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
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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.
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Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
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One of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance... Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.
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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.
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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.
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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
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