Quote

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

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
Simplest
Hardest
Questions
Answer
Answers
Knowledge

More quotes by Northrop Frye

Image
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
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
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Northrop Frye
Image
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye
Image
Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
Northrop Frye
Image
We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
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
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
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
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?
Northrop Frye
Image
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
Northrop Frye
Image
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.
Northrop Frye
Image
We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
Northrop Frye
Image
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
Northrop Frye
Image
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
Northrop Frye
Image
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
Northrop Frye