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Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
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Between religion's "this is" and poetry's "but suppose this is" there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.
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An aphorism is not a cliche: it penetrates & bites. It has wit, and consequently an affinity with satire... Christ speaks in aphorisms, not because they are alive, but because he is.
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The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work.
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The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.
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You can never get rid of God as long as you continue to use words, because all words are part of the Word.
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One of the major activities of art consists in sharpening the edge of platitudes to make them enter the soul as realities.
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The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.
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The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts... Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.
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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.
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Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.
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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.
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In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
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The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.
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The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.
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The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice.
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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.
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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.
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The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.
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Finnegans Wake is a kind of hypnagogic structure, words reverberating on themselves without pointing to objects... This may be the hallucinatory verbal world within which God speaks.
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The primary function of education is to make one maladjusted to ordinary society.
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Nothing is more remarkable in the Bible than the absence of argument... Argument is internal continuity. So is logical sequence in narrative: in the Bible the connectives are just "and."
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A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.
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Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
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Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Northrop Frye
Born:
July 14, 1912
Died:
January 23, 1991
(aged 78)
Bio:
Herman Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
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art
human
criticism
book
life
bible
people
imagination
time
man
nature
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