Quote

The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.

Northrop Frye

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Northrop Frye

Image
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
Image
We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
Northrop Frye
Image
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a type or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
Northrop Frye
Image
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
Northrop Frye
Image
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
Northrop Frye
Image
We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
Northrop Frye
Image
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
Northrop Frye
Image
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Northrop Frye
Image
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
Image
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
Northrop Frye
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Northrop Frye