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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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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Tremendous
Medium
Mediums
Patient
Economy
Book
World
Demonstrated
Efficiency

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
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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.
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There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.
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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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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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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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We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
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Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of
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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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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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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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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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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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No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.
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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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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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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
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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.
Northrop Frye
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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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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye