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[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.

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
Tendency
Inherent
Tendencies
Myth
Romance
Fiction
Strong
Science
Mode

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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
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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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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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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 simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
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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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The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]
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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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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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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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The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
Northrop Frye