Northrop Frye: Use

“You can never get rid of God as long as you continue to use words, because all words are part of the Word.”

Northrop Frye

Source: "Quotes", Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), p. 871

God , Parting

“We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School
Context: [L]iterature not only leads us toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don't like and want to get away from... We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.... Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.

Life , Nature , Problem

“The use of cliché [is] the use of ready-made, prefabricated formulas designed to give those who are too lazy think the illusion of thinking”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Context: The use of cliché [is] the use of ready-made, prefabricated formulas designed to give those who are too lazy think the illusion of thinking... If our aim is only to say what gets by in society, our reactions will become almost completely mechanical. That's the direction cliché takes us in... it's no more a product of a conscious mind than the bark of a dog.

Thinking

“Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts,”

Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 3: Giants in Time
Context: One of the most obvious uses [of literature], I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities.

Art

“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

“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

“What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure" or "exact" science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.”

Northrop Frye

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

Art , Science

“Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.”

Northrop Frye

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

People , Art , Question

“All texts are incarnational, and the climax of the entire Christian Bible, "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," is the most logocentric sentence ever written.”

Northrop Frye

1:154
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“…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

“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

“No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.”

Northrop Frye

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

Life , Art , Imagination , Literature

“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

“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

“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