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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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Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Integration
Metaphor
Unity
Human
Humans
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Finiteness
Mind
Metaphors
Derived

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Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.
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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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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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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
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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.
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A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
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Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
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Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
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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.
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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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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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Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
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