Northrop Frye said this quote

“ 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. ”

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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.

~ Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye Imagination Literature Metaphor Writing

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

~ Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye Devine Nature

(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.

~ Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye Nature Self Unity

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

~ Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye Accountant American Canadian Money