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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
Mind
Metaphors
Derived
Integration
Metaphor
Unity
Human
Humans
Take
Finiteness

More quotes by 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.
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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
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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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I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
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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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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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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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.
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The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
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It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question Who am I? than by some such riddle as Where is here?
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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
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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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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
Northrop Frye
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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
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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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
Northrop Frye
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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Northrop Frye