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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.

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
Sleep
Getting
Language
Place
Problem
Illiteracy
Enough
Wherever
Fundamental
Fundamentals

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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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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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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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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]
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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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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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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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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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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
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The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
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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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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
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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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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
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Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
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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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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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Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Northrop Frye
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The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
Northrop Frye