Northrop Frye Quotes (137 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Anatomy of Criticism

Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye: 137 quotes3 likes

Famous Northrop Frye Quotes

“The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.”

“As civilization develops, we become more preoccupied with human life, and less conscious of our relation to non-human nature. Literature reflects this, and the more advanced the civilization, the more literature seems to concern itself with purely human problems and conflicts. The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

“At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html <br class="br">Context: At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.

“Nobody 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. [p.93]”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Context: Freedom has nothing to do with lack of training; it can only be the product of training. You're not free to move unless you've learned to walk, and not free to play the piano unless you practise. Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use the language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at.

“Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.”

Northrop Frye

Source: The Educated Imagination

“Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody every writes his dream book.”

Northrop Frye

33.54
"Quotes", Notebooks

Northrop Frye Quotes about literature

“Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.”

Northrop Frye

The Stubborn Structure, p. 84
"Quotes"

“No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 4: The Keys To Dreamland

“No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

“The world of literature is human in shape”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html <br class="br">Context: The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment. Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate experience... The world of literature is human in shape, a world where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west over the edge of a flat earth in three dimensions, where the primary realities are not atoms or electrons but bodies, and the primary forces not energy or gravitation but love and death and passion and joy.

“Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

“In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype

Northrop Frye Quotes about the world

“Finnegans Wake is a kind of hypnagogic structure, words reverberating on themselves without pointing to objects…This may be the hallucinatory verbal world within which God speaks.”

Northrop Frye

1:399
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

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

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Five, p. 158

“…there is something about time and space that is not real, and something about us that is. However man may have tumbled into this world of indefinite space, he does not belong to it at all. Real space for him is the eternal here; where we are is always the center of the universe, and the circumference of the universe, just as real time is the 'eternal Now' of our personal experience.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Fearful Symmetry : A Study of William Blake (1947), p. 46

“Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Context: We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.

“The objective world is only “material”: it’s there, but it could be there in a great many different forms and aspects…Even here there [are] still possibilities”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972 (2002)
Context: The objective world is only “material”: it’s there, but it could be there in a great many different forms and aspects... Even here there [are] still possibilities: it can’t be just anything. But perhaps extracting a finite schema from the variety of mythologies, literatures, or religions might contribute something to the understanding of what some of these possibilities could be. The individual can’t create his own world, except in art or fantasy: society can only create a myth of concern. What fun if one could get just a peep at what some of the other worlds are that a new humanity could create–no, live in. (p. 287-8)

“I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as the time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world.”

Northrop Frye

Preface of the 1969 edition of Fearful Symmetry : A Study of William Blake (1947)
"Quotes", Fearful Symmetry : A Study of William Blake (1947)
Context: I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as the time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world. Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerful in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say.

Northrop Frye: Trending quotes

“There can be no free speech in a mob: free speech is one thing a mob can't stand.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence

“You can never get rid of God as long as you continue to use words, because all words are part of the Word.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), p. 871

“We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath 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

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School
Context: [L]iterature not only leads us toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don't like and want to get away from... We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath 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.... Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.

Northrop Frye Quotes

“We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work”

Northrop Frye book The Well-Tempered Critic

The Well-Tempered Critic, p. 140
"Quotes"
Context: The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work.

“The use of cliché [is] the use of ready-made, prefabricated formulas designed to give those who are too lazy think the illusion of thinking”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Context: The use of cliché [is] the use of ready-made, prefabricated formulas designed to give those who are too lazy think the illusion of thinking... If our aim is only to say what gets by in society, our reactions will become almost completely mechanical. That's the direction cliché takes us in... it's no more a product of a conscious mind than the bark of a dog.

“A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction
Context: A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.

“In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Context: In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader.

“But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.”

Northrop Frye

“I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.”

Northrop Frye

"Statement for the Day of My Death"
"Quotes"
Context: The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.

“The poet…is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Context: The poet... is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.

“Finnegans Wake is not a book to read, but a book to decipher:”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 4: The Keys To Dreamland
Context: Finnegans Wake is not a book to read, but a book to decipher: as Joyce says, it's about a dreamer, but it's addressed to an ideal reader suffering from ideal insomnia.

“Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Context: Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn't just train the mind: it's a social and moral development too.

“Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts,”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Context: One of the most obvious uses [of literature], I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities.

“The wise man looks for the invisible line between the "is" and the "is not" which is the way through”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)
Context: Man is born lost in a forest. If he is obsessed by the thereness of the forest, he stays lost and goes in circles; if he assumes the forest is not there, he keeps bumping into trees. The wise man looks for the invisible line between the "is" and the "is not" which is the way through. The street in the city, the highway in the desert, the pathway of the planets through the labyrinth of the stars, are parallel forms. (1:111)

“The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Context: The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at ay time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that tis main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. That language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quite for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer [to] heaven, and that it is time to return to the earth.

“For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at ay time may crash around our ears.”

Northrop Frye

“We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 325

“The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction

“I must have God on my own terms, because God on somebody else’s terms is an idol.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972 (2002), p. 61

“The poet's job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place. He gives you the typical, recurring, or what Aristotle calls universal event.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

“Nothing is more remarkable in the Bible than the absence of argument…Argument is internal continuity. So is logical sequence in narrative: in the Bible the connectives are just "and."”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 200

“In society's eyes the virtue of saying the right thing at the right time is more important that the virtue of telling the whole truth, or even of telling the truth at all.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence

“Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction

“A literary critic of experience never defines anything.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), p. 4

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

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter One, p. 7

“What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure" or "exact" science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction

“The Great Code was a silly and sloppy book. It was also a work of very great genius. The point is that genius is not enough. A book worthy of God and of Helen [Frye's wife] must do better than that.”

Northrop Frye

1:160
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction

“[Students] have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don’t know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), p. 746

“Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Three, p. 58

“Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.”

Northrop Frye

Introduction, p. xviii
"Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)

“I don`t want the reduction of religion to aesthetics, but the abolition of aesthetics & incorporating of art with the Word of God.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 7

“One should have bigger & better conversions everyday, like a mechanized phoenix.”

Northrop Frye

21.495
"Quotes", Notebooks

“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that is transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Anagogic Phase: Symbol as Monad

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

Northrop Frye

Fables of Identity (1963)
"Quotes"

“What’s transcendental in Blake is not the statically geometrical, but the sense of arrested energy: the wriggling vines & snakes, flames & the like…It’s an expression of the belief that every object is an event.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972 (2002), p. 14

“Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a "type" or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Four, p. 79

“The human mind is [a poet's] individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our [the readers'] minds too. There is no self-expression in [a poet's] poem, because once the poem is there the individual [poet] has disappeared. …there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time

“The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html

“All texts are incarnational, and the climax of the entire Christian Bible, "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," is the most logocentric sentence ever written.”

Northrop Frye

1:154
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“Between religion's "this is" and poetry's "but suppose this is" there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Anagogic Phase: Symbol as Monad

“The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter 8, p. 230

“The total simultaneous pattern always extend from alpha to omega.”

Northrop Frye

21.190
"Quotes", Notebooks

“There is a curious law of art…that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.”

Northrop Frye

“Design as a Principle in the Arts”, The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975, p. 232
"Quotes"

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype

“The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.”

Northrop Frye

21.101
"Quotes", Notebooks

“I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation, revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Five, p. 106

“The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts…Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.”

Northrop Frye

"The Secular Scripture" and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991, p. 164
"Quotes"

“One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.”

Northrop Frye

1:313
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“Education is a set of analogies to a genuinely human existence, of which the arts are the model. Merely human life is of course a demonic analogy or parody of genuinely human life.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 149

“Art is not simply an identity of illusion and reality, but a counter-illusion: its world is a material world, but the material of an intelligible spiritual world.”

Northrop Frye

1:73
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.”

Northrop Frye

Words with Power : Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature (1990), Introduction, p. xiii http://books.google.com/books?id=ZnSJb6PPnBoC&pg=PP81&lpg=PP81&dq=%22which+is+inherited,+transmitted+and+diversified+by+literature%22&source=bl&ots=xJ1cLDaUCI&sig=m6agYWMBlW0qfDYMA7aX9aNM8IE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PaCqUsiEM-issQT_4oGAAg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22which%20is%20inherited%2C%20transmitted%20and%20diversified%20by%20literature%22&f=false <br class="br">"Quotes"

“It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and where we have to surrender precision for flexibility.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Three, p. 56