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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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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Anything
Nothing
Really
World
Imaginatively
Goes
Imagination
Possible
Happens

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The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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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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Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
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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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We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
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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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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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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
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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.
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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
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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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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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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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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye