Quotes from Northrop Frye

Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.

Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.

My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .

The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.

The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.

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.

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.

The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

Americans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it. I know no country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.