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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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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
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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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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.
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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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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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The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
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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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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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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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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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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.
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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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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.
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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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I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.
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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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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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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
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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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