238 Quotes by Northrop Frye

Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony; colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.

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.