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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

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
Writer
Really
Life
Like
Lifelike
Bring
Literature
Anything

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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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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We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop Frye
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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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The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
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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Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character...tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game.
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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The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
Northrop Frye
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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
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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Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Northrop Frye
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Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
Northrop Frye
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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
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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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
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
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The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
Northrop Frye
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The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
Northrop Frye
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One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
Northrop Frye
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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye