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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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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Screen
Screens
Calls
Creates
History
Men
Workings
Conceal
Apocalypse

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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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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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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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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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.
Northrop Frye
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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
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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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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
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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I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye
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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
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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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 most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
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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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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The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
Northrop Frye