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Northrop Frye Quotes
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Herman Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Frye gained international fame with his first book, Fearful Symmetry , which led to the reinterpretation of the poetry of William Blake. His lasting reputation rests principally on the theory of literary criticism that he developed in Anatomy of Criticism , one of the most important works of literary theory published in the twentieth century. The American critic Harold Bloom commented at the time of its publication that Anatomy established Frye as "the foremost living student of Western literature." Frye's contributions to cultural and social criticism spanned a long career during which he earned widespread recognition and received many honours. Wikipedia  

✵ 14. July 1912 – 23. January 1991   •   Other names Нортроп Фрай, Нортроп Фрај, ਨੋਰਥਰੋਪ ਫ੍ਰਾਈ
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Northrop Frye: 137   quotes 3   likes

Northrop Frye Quotes

“The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Three, p. 61

“The real Bible is a sealed book, an apocryphon, a book not to be opened (mentally) until its time has come.”

Northrop Frye

2:568
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

Books , Time

“We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Four, p. 83

Life , Dreams , Feeling

“The "flow of information," which is mostly misinformation, is actually a presentation of myths. And people are increasingly rejecting the prescribed myths & developing their own counter-myths.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 97

People

“One person by himself is not a complete human being.”

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

Personality

“We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.”

Northrop Frye

1:281
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“A community`s art is its spiritual vision.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 206

Art , Communication

“This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.(pg.18)”

Northrop Frye

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

Literature , Thinking , Loss

“I have a notion that a prolonged period of solitude & fasting would produce hallucinations, & that these would be mandalas and such: they would be the essential forms in which "outer" perceptions are organized.”

Northrop Frye

18.23
"Quotes", Notebooks

Solitude

“When you stop to think about it, you soon realize that our imagination is what our whole social life is really based on…. In practically everything we do it's thee combination of emotion and intellect we call imagination that goes to work.”

Northrop Frye

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

Life , Imagination , Thinking

“An aphorism is not a cliche: it penetrates & bites. It has wit, and consequently an affinity with satire…Christ speaks in aphorisms, not because they are alive, but because he is.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 108

Christ

“The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter 8, p. 199

Books , Reading

“Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.”

Northrop Frye

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

Reading

“Genius is a power of the soul and that powers of the soul can be developed by everyone.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 8

Soul

“Just as a new scientific discovery manifests sometimes 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 Frye

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

Nature , Science , Time

“The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Two, p. 31

Study , Time , Reading

“The mark of a great writer: who sees his own time, but with a detachment that makes him communicable to other ages.”

Northrop Frye

2:579
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

Age , Time

“Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Six, p. 168

“Jargon or gobbledygook, or what people who live in Washington or Ottawa call "federal prose," [is] the gabble of abstractions and vague words which avoids any simple or direct statement…. Direct and simple language always has some force behind it, and the writers of gobbledygook don't want to be forceful; they want to be soothing and reassuring.”

Northrop Frye

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

People

“The worst thing we can say about God is that he knows all. The best thing we can say of him is that, on the whole, he tends to keep his knowledge to himself.”

Northrop Frye

2:568
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

God , Knowledge

“The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter 8, p. 200

Life , Death

“The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life…is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.”

Northrop Frye

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

Life , Imagination

“I give the impression of elusiveness sometimes, and rightly, because I really do have an inner chamber in my temple I'm not mature enough to open.”

Northrop Frye

2:618
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“A purely individualized myth is an obsession, sometimes a psychosis. A purely socialized myth is an ideology, which sooner or later also becomes obsessive or psychotic. A myth that has either the direct current of transcendence or the alternating current of imagination rises clear of this grisly antithesis.”

Northrop Frye

2:716
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

Imagination

“The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.”

Northrop Frye

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

Truth , Beauty

“We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.”

Northrop Frye

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

“Yesterday's kook book becomes tomorrow's standard text.”

Northrop Frye

2:495
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

Books

“Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.”

Northrop Frye

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

Religion , Understanding

“Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Five, p. 136

History

“Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process.”

Northrop Frye

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

Life , Way , Literature , Past

“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