Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
States
Much
Swallowed
Popular
Threat
Americans
American
United
Culture

More quotes by Northrop Frye

Image
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Northrop Frye
Image
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
Northrop Frye
Image
The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
Northrop Frye
Image
Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
Northrop Frye
Image
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
Northrop Frye
Image
We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
Northrop Frye
Image
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
Northrop Frye
Image
Americans like to make money Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
Northrop Frye
Image
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
Northrop Frye
Image
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]
Northrop Frye
Image
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
Northrop Frye
Image
The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
Northrop Frye