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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.

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
Men
Concern
Assumptions
Like
Animal
Existential
Belief
Concerns
Within
Assumption
Universe
Directly
Lives
Developed
Nature
Beliefs
Nakedly
Body
Animals
Mythological

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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 .
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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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One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
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Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
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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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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
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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 tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
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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 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.
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The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
Northrop Frye
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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop Frye
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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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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.
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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
Northrop Frye