Northrop Frye Quotes

151 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Northrop Frye
Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody every writes his dream book.

Northrop Frye
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.

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

Northrop Frye
To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.

Northrop Frye
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.

Northrop Frye
An open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the food pipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake.

Northrop Frye
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
Metaphor is the language of immanence; metonymy of transcendence.

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

Northrop Frye
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him.

Northrop Frye
The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.

Northrop Frye
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.

Northrop Frye
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.

Northrop Frye
Education is a set of analogies to a genuinely human existence, of which the arts are the model. Merely human life is of course a demonic analogy or parody of genuinely human life.

Northrop Frye
Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world.

Northrop Frye
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
We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit.

Northrop Frye
It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and where we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

Northrop Frye
Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.

Northrop Frye
A literary critic of experience never defines anything.

Northrop Frye
There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.

Northrop Frye
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
The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him.

Northrop Frye
I'm a Blakean, a visionary disciple... But I'm always torn between feeling that the cock crows because he has a vision of the dawn, or because he feels stimulated by standing on top of a pile horseshit.

Northrop Frye
I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.

Northrop Frye
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation, revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.

Northrop Frye
Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favour with its original audience as a new generation up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of "quaint" and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.

Northrop Frye
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