Northrop Frye Quotes

151 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Northrop Frye
The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about Newton's time most people took the "up" of heaven and the "down" of hell to be more or less descriptive.

Northrop Frye
Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children's play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in "playing" chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for.

Northrop Frye
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.

Northrop Frye
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.

Northrop Frye
Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, recognizes that it is man's destiny to unite and not divide, and understands that creating proletariats and scapegoats and second-class citizens is a mean and contemptible activity.

Northrop Frye
Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.

Northrop Frye
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.

Northrop Frye
In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.

Northrop Frye
Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.

Northrop Frye
The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.

Northrop Frye
The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

Northrop Frye
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
Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.

Northrop Frye
Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.

Northrop Frye
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

Northrop Frye
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 still with us.

Northrop Frye
There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

Northrop Frye
I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

Northrop Frye
Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience.

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

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

Northrop Frye
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