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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.

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
Story
Stories
Think
Regaining
Thinking
Framework
Identity
Loss
Literature

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
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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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One of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance... Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.
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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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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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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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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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The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
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I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.
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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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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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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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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
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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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Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Northrop Frye
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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
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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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
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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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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.
Northrop Frye