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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
Goes
Imagination
Possible
Happens
Anything
Nothing
Really
World
Imaginatively

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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.
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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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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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Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
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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 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.
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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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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
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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 primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
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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.
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
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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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Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
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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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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
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One of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance... Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.
Northrop Frye
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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
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