Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

— Northrop Frye

Americans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it. I know no country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.

— Northrop Frye

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

— Northrop Frye

A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.

— Northrop Frye

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.

— Northrop Frye

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

— Northrop Frye

I feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I've felt that it was really a part of me, and I hope I'll have that feeling again, and that next time it won't go away. That's a dim, misty outline of the story that's told so often, of how man once lived in a golden age or a garden of Eden or the Hesperides ... how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again. ... This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.

— Northrop Frye

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

— Northrop Frye

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

— Northrop Frye

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.

— Northrop Frye