Quotes by Northrop Frye

“We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.”

“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 merc...”

“The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.”

“We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.”

“The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.”

“The bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.”

“War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.”

“There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.”

“Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.”

“Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.”

“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 ...”

“We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.”

“Historically a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.”

“Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.”

“Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.”

“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 se...”

“Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.”

“The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to...”

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

“The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides th...”