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Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process.

— Northrop Frye The Educated Imagination (1963)

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More quotes by Northrop Frye

Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)

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

Fables of Identity (1963)

The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)

The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared.

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)

The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Northrop Frye (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.