Northrop Frye: Quotes about the 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.”

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.

World , Literature , Reading , Parting

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

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: 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.

World , Imagination

“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.

World , Literature , 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)

World

“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.

War , World , Fear , Understanding

“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

“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

World , Way

“…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

World , Universe , Time , Personality

“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)