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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

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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
Reading
Traces
Ends
Total
Discover
Bible
Structure
Succeed
Beginning
Least

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The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.
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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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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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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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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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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 disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
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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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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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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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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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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
Northrop Frye
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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.
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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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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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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.
Northrop Frye
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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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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
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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