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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

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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
Action
Beliefs
Preoccupied
Art
Arts
Bigots
Also
Actions
Fanatics
Think
Obvious
Uses
Possibility
Seldom
Literature
Encouragement
Belief
Possibilities
Use
Tolerance

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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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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?
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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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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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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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Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
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I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
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Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
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In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
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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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This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.
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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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We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
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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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