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The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

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
Simplest
Hardest
Questions
Answer
Answers
Knowledge

More quotes by Northrop Frye

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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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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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Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
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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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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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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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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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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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One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the 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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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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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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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
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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.
Northrop Frye
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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
Northrop Frye
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Teaching literature is impossible that is why it is difficult.
Northrop Frye
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Poetry can only be made out of other poems novels out of other novels.
Northrop Frye
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No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.
Northrop Frye
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The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye
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Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
Northrop Frye