Northrop Frye

“Tragic heroes are so much the highest points in their human landscape that they seem the inevitable conductors of the power about them.”

“The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.”

“The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.”

“A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory.”

“Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.”

“The artist who is not also a craftsman is no artist at all.”

“The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.”

“The test of a man's worth is what he does when he has power.”

“What literature can and should do is remind us that we are all members of a single human society.”

“Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.”

“The motive for metaphor... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human and the non-human worlds.”

“The culture of the past is not only the memory of the human race, but the matrix of its present and future.”