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Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images.

— Northrop Frye The Bush Garden (1971)

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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.