Northrop Frye Literature Quotations

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

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

Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.

Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.

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

Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.

The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.

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.

I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

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.

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

Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.

Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

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. [p.92]

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.

Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.

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