238 Quotes by Northrop Frye

A few years ago it was they who led the cult of doing one's own thing, but now they are turning increasingly to communes and social settlements, rather like the Utopian projects of the nineteenth century.

Criticism is the primary act of human awareness: it expresses detachment without separation.

Literature is the total body of stories and symbols that provides hypotheses or models of human behavior and experience.

I can't imagine a social worker, for example, devoting herself to such a profession unless she had in her mind, at some level of consciousness, a vision of a better society than the one she's actually engaged with day after day.

We celebrate the Resurrection every Easter, but Easter by itself does not suggest resurrection; it suggests only the renewing of the cycle of time, the euphoria with which we greet the end of winter and the coming of summer.

The reason why detectives in detective stories are so preternaturally intelligent is that they're angels. Guardian angels of society; avenging angels for the murder. Everyone is guilty of something, so all the major character are suspects.

Let your approach to knowledge be without fear, for God wills to reveal himself, and his revelation is mysterious only because it is infinite.

Literature is founded on the metaphor that arrests logic and the myth that arrests history; its works are objects of contemplation.

Consciousness in a world which with or consciousness is only a mechanism: damn uncomfortable situation.