1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye Quotes
page 3

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
Northrop Frye photo
Northrop Frye: 137   quotes 3   likes

Northrop Frye Quotes

“If I had been on the hills of Bethlehem in the year one, I do not think I should have heard angels singing because I do not hear them now, & there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 74

Angels , Thinking , Singing

“Under the stimulation of a "great age" or certain period of clarity in art a wider diffusion of genius becomes actual suggests to me that it is always potential.”

Northrop Frye

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

Age , Art

“Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.”

Northrop Frye

Letter to Helen Kemp, 1935, The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939, (1996), p. 1:426
"Quotes"

World , Hell , Reading

“The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter Seven, p. 169

Life , Tree , Water

“I have never had the sort of experience the mystics talk about, never felt a revelation of reality through or beyond nature, never felt like Adam in Paradise, never felt, in direct experience, that the world is wholly other than it seems…The nearest I have come to such experiences are glimpses of my own creative powers…and these are moments or intervals of inspiration rather than vision. I’m not sure that I want it unless I can have clarity about other things with it.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972 (2002), p. 60–1

World , Nature , Reality

“There's something in all of us that wants to drift toward a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we use words, we're either righting against this tendency or giving in to it. When we fight against it, we're taking the side of genuine and permanent human civilization.”

Northrop Frye

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

Hate , People , Thinking , Time

“Metaphor is the language of immanence; metonymy of transcendence.”

Northrop Frye

11C.21
"Quotes", Notebooks

“[What Poets Say:]”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Notebooks

“The soul is an immaculate virgin…Then it goes out and gets fucked by the world all day long & staggers back a baggy-eyed old whore, still hoping that after a sleep the Moment of purification will come again.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 27

Sleep , Soul , Whore , Hope

“The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.”

Northrop Frye

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

World , Imagination , Reality , Literature

“The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.”

Northrop Frye

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981) according to Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death p 13.
"Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)

Past

“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.”

Northrop Frye

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

Personality , Training , Education

“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.”

Northrop Frye

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

Time , Reading , Literature , World

“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.”

Northrop Frye

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

Literature , World , Reading , Parting

“The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve.'”

Northrop Frye

Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.
The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html

Problem , Literature

“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.”

Northrop Frye book Anatomy of Criticism

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

Memory , Art , Life