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
Mediums
Patient
Economy
Book
World
Demonstrated
Efficiency
Tremendous
Medium

More quotes by Northrop Frye

Image
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
Image
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
Northrop Frye
Image
Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
Northrop Frye
Image
We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
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
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
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
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
Image
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
Northrop Frye
Image
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
Image
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
Image
Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
Northrop Frye
Image
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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