Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
Northrop FryeNobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.
Northrop FryeJust as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
Northrop FryeIt seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?
Northrop Frye