Quote

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

Northrop Frye

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Enough
Wherever
Fundamental
Fundamentals
Sleep
Getting
Language
Place
Problem
Illiteracy

More quotes by Northrop Frye

Image
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Northrop Frye
Image
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
Northrop Frye
Image
We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
Northrop Frye
Image
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?
Northrop Frye
Image
We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
Northrop Frye
Image
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
Northrop Frye
Image
Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
Northrop Frye
Image
Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
Northrop Frye
Image
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
Northrop Frye
Image
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
Northrop Frye
Image
We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
Northrop Frye