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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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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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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
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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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Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
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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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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?
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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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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.
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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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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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The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
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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.
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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
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Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
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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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Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Northrop Frye