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

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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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.
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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
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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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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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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
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We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
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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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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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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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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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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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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.
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The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
Northrop Frye