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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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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
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Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
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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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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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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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In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
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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.
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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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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 simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
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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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We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
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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.
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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]
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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.
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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Northrop Frye
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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
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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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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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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye