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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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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Become
Aspects
Stills
Hasn
Still
Aspect
Human
Magic
Ceremonies
Humans
Literature
Embedded
Thing
Society
Ceremony
Kind
Religion
Distinguished
Life
Social
Primitive
More quotes by Northrop Frye
We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
Northrop Frye
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Northrop Frye
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
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
Northrop Frye
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
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
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
Northrop Frye
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
Northrop Frye
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
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
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Northrop Frye
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.
Northrop Frye
The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
Northrop Frye
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Northrop Frye
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.
Northrop Frye
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
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
Northrop Frye
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
