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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
Tendencies
Myth
Romance
Fiction
Strong
Science
Mode
Tendency
Inherent

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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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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
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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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We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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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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The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
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No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
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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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