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The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.

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
Literal
Poetic
Primaries
Primary
Bible
Meaning

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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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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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.
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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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I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
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There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.
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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
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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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Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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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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The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
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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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Americans like to make money Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.
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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.
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Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye