Northrop Frye Quotes
Top 53 wise famous quotes and sayings by Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Northrop Frye on Wise Famous Quotes.
Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
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.
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.
We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.
Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.
Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93]
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.