238 Quotes by Northrop Frye

One doesn’t bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There’s no adventure of the mind.

Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a “type” or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense.

The book is the world’s most patient medium.

In the world of the imagination, anything goes that’s imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.

If Shakespeare were alive now, no doubt he’d be interviewed every week and his opinions canvassed on every subject from national foreign policy to the social effects of punk rock. But in his day nobody cared what Shakespeare’s views were about anything, and he wouldn’t have been allowed to discuss public affairs publicly. He wasn’t, therefore, under a constant pressure to become opinionated.

The motive for metaphor... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.

The distance between pupil and teacher diminishes as the former gets older: by the end of high school the teacher should be a a fellow student.

A teacher who is not a scholar is soon to be going out of touch with his own subject, and a scholar who is not a teacher is soon going to be out of touch with the world.

Learning things is linear; growth is a curve, and learning hs to be bent in that curve before it's part of a personality.