Northrop Frye Quotes
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The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
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The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.
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The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
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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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Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.
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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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Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
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Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.
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War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.
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Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
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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.