Northrop Frye Quotes

151 Sourced Quotes

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

Northrop Frye
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.

Northrop Frye
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.

Northrop Frye
I have a notion that a prolonged period of solitude & fasting would produce hallucinations, & that these would be mandalas and such: they would be the essential forms in which "outer" perceptions are organized.

Northrop Frye
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.

Northrop Frye
In imaginative thought there is no real knowledge of anything but similarities (ultimately identities): knowledge of differences is merely a transition to a new knowledge of similarities.

Northrop Frye
[Students] have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don't know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach.

Northrop Frye
Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

Northrop Frye
Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

Northrop Frye
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.

Northrop Frye
The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Northrop Frye