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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
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Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Body
Animals
Mythological
Men
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Assumptions
Like
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Existential
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Concerns
Within
Assumption
Universe
Directly
Lives
Developed
Nature
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Nakedly

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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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.
Northrop Frye
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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
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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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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Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character...tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game.
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.
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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Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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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
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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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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
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 simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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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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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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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye