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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
Fiction
Strong
Science
Mode
Tendency
Inherent
Tendencies
Myth
Romance

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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
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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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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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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.
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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
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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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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.
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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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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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The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
Northrop Frye
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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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The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
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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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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The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible... to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.
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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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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.
Northrop Frye