Northrop Frye - Experience Quotes

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... there is something about time and space that is not real, and something about us that is. However man may have tumbled into this world of indefinite space, he does not belong to it at all. Real space for him is the eternal here; where we are is always the center of the universe, and the circumference of the universe, just as real time is the 'eternal Now' of our personal experience.

Northrop Frye
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.

Northrop Frye
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.

Northrop Frye
The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.

Northrop Frye
A literary critic of experience never defines anything.

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

Northrop Frye