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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.

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
Deal
Fable
Deals
Hare
Says
Hares
Shows
Consoling
Ends
Fables
Good
Tire
Tortoise
Signs
Tortoises
Speed
Tiring

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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
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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.
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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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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
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The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
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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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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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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
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The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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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.
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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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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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We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
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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.
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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.
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