Northrop Frye: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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

"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.

Time

“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.

Knowledge , Learning

“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

Imagination , Cats , Literature , Hell

“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

Study , Reading , Forgetting

“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

Books , Dreams , Loss

“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

Justice , Way

“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

God

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

Northrop Frye

The Stubborn Structure, p. 84
"Quotes"

Literature

“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

Universe

“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

Truth , Time

“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

Art , Nature , Knowledge , Study

“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
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.

World , Literature

“A literary critic of experience never defines anything.”

Northrop Frye

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