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Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.

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
Would
Writer
Trust
Read
Also
Book
Rewrite
Writing
Central
Every
Myth
Never
Certainly

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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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.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.
Northrop Frye
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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
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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 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.
Northrop Frye
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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
Northrop Frye
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We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
Northrop Frye
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A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
Northrop Frye
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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
Northrop Frye
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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?
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
Northrop Frye
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Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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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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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
Northrop Frye
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We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop Frye