Northrop Frye Quotes

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

The reason is that till date, in spite of advances in information technology and strategies of information, the written word in the form of books still remains one of humanity's most enduring legacies.

The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.

May books spread the world over!

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer.

It's interesting how powerful, in fact, the printed page still is.

The book has had a good run. For 550 years, it was the most practical way to deliver writing to multiple readers.

Reading is essential to human life. When the last reader dies, humanity will be at an end.

Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be -- to me in all events -- a terrible thing without books.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Reading taught me how to write.

You can't have an industrial revolution, you can't have democracies, you can't have populations who can govern themselves until you have literacy. The printing press simply unlocked literacy.

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house.

Read everything! I believe that reading made me a writer.

One of the most important things in my childhood were the new books that came in. I feel sorry for kids today who have so many other options like television that they may not value books as much as they could enjoy them.

the day Johannes Gutenberg finished his wooden printing press in 1440. Western civilization turned onto a path toward more efficient, accessible communication of knowledge.]

I'm sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.

Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.