Northrop Frye

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former.

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

Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.

So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities. It's possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.

Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities.

Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation_

(U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.

For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.

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.

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.

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

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

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

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.

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

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

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

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.