Northrop Frye: Trending quotes (page 6)

“My greater simplicity came from a deeper level than the labyrinth of the brain.”

Northrop Frye

1:61-2
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter 8, p. 232

“All writers are conventional, because all writers have the same problem of transferring their language from direct speech to the imagination. For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.”

Northrop Frye

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

People , Imagination , Literature , Problem

“Nobody seriously thinks of television as a viewer's mode of perception…No matter how much he wants people to look at his product, the advertiser doesn't realize that television is [the viewer's] way of looking at him, & not his way of reaching them.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 95-6

People , Way , Thinking

“One of the major activities of art consists in sharpening the edge of platitudes to make them enter the soul as realities.”

Northrop Frye

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

Art , Soul , Reality

“It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Formal Phase: Symbol as Image

“Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter 8, p. 224

Men , World , Time

“Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world.”

Northrop Frye

19.333
"Quotes", Notebooks

World

“Continuous prose suggests complete identification with the representing, observing, immersing-in-object self. Aphorisms suggest a richer & varied personality made up more of internal conflicts and decisions. An epiphanic sequence suggests the highest mystery of personality.”

Northrop Frye

33.47
"Quotes", Notebooks

Decision , Personality

“A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.”

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

People , Literature , Personality

“In imaginative thought there is no real knowledge of anything but similarities (ultimately identities): knowledge of differences is merely a transition to a new knowledge of similarities.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 215

Imagination , Knowledge

“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), p. 70

People , Literature , Business

“Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.”

Northrop Frye

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

Literature , Study

“The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 5: Verticals Of Adam

Speed

“No matter what direction we start off in, the signposts of literature always keep pointing the same way, to a world where nothing is outside the imagination. If even time, the enemy of all living things, and to poets, the most hated and feared of all tyrants, can be broken down by the imagination, anything can be.”

Northrop Frye

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

Hate , World , Fear , Way

“Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.”

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

Science

“If you haven't got an excremental vision you have no business setting up as a major satirist.”

Northrop Frye

2:578-9
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

Business

“Belief has nothing to do with knowledge, & credo ut intelligam [I believe in order that I might understand] is horseshit.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 209

Understanding , Knowledge

“I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.’ That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the university…There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being carried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities.”

Northrop Frye

"Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity: Northrop Frye." Descant 12, no. 32-3 (1981).
"Quotes", Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008)

Thinking , Personality

“The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter One, p. 13

World , Nature , Thinking , Sense