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Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
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Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
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A literary critic of experience never defines anything.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation, revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
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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.
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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.
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The total simultaneous pattern always extend from alpha to omega.
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The soul is an immaculate virgin... Then it goes out and gets fucked by the world all day long & staggers back a baggy-eyed old whore, still hoping that after a sleep the Moment of purification will come again.
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The book is the most efficient technological instrument for learning that has ever been devised by the human mind.
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The real Bible is a sealed book, an apocryphon, a book not to be opened (mentally) until its time has come.
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Criticism... is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom.
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I give the impression of elusiveness sometimes, and rightly, because I really do have an inner chamber in my temple I'm not mature enough to open.
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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.
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The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
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Genius is a power of the soul and that powers of the soul can be developed by everyone.
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We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit.
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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.
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Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world.
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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.
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Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
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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human
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life
bible
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imagination
time
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nature
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