Northrop Frye - Imagination Quotes

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We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.

Northrop Frye
Imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept.

Northrop Frye
Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.

Northrop Frye
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.

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
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.

Northrop Frye
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

Northrop Frye
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him.

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

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

Northrop Frye