Northrop Frye Quotes & Sayings

The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts ... Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach. — Northrop Frye

Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds. — 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. Above all, we have to look at the total design of a writer's work, the title he gives to it, and the his main theme, which means his point in writing it, to understand that literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows. [p.32] — Northrop Frye

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object. — Northrop Frye

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable. — Northrop Frye

It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition. — Northrop Frye

[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth. — Northrop Frye

For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man. — Northrop Frye

Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character ... tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game. — Northrop Frye

In this perspective what I like or don't like disappears, because there's nothing left of me as a separate person: as a reader of literature I exist only as a representative of humanity as a whole. We — Northrop Frye

Literature encourages tolerance-bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities. — Northrop Frye

It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal shape is concerned, it will be equally mythical in either case. But we notice that any emphasis on shape or structure or pattern or form always throws a verbal narrative in the direction we call mythical rather than historical.(p.21) — Northrop Frye

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. [p.250] — Northrop Frye

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

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

Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities. — Northrop Frye

This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature. — Northrop Frye

Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a "type" or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense. — Northrop Frye

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent. — Northrop Frye

This is an example of why the humanists have always insisted that you don't learn to think wholly from one language: you learn to think better from linguistic conflict, from bouncing one language off another. — Northrop Frye

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that. — Northrop Frye

Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world. — Northrop Frye

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented. — Northrop Frye

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer. — Northrop Frye

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them. — Northrop Frye

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. — Northrop Frye

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

Wisdom is the central form which gives meaning and position to all the facts which are acquired by knowledge, the digestion and assimilation of whatever in the material world the man comes in contact with. — Northrop Frye

The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions. — Northrop Frye

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

The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity. — Northrop Frye

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

One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind. — Northrop Frye

The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that. — 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

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

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. — Northrop Frye

The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing. [p.211] — Northrop Frye

Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of — Northrop Frye

The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation. — Northrop Frye

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] — Northrop Frye

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. — Northrop Frye

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind. — Northrop Frye

We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks. — Northrop Frye

So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities. It's possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous. — Northrop Frye

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself. — 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

A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone. — Northrop Frye

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

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas. — 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 primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning. — Northrop Frye

Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions. — Northrop Frye

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

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. [p.92] — Northrop Frye

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

Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading. — 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

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

The only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain point: the most faithfully descriptive account of anything will always turn away from what it describes into its own self-contained grammatical fictions of subject and predicate and object. — Northrop Frye

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language. — 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 metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones. — Northrop Frye

Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows. — 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

We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it. — Northrop Frye

Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure. — Northrop Frye

I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse. — Northrop Frye

Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean. — 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

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

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

We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity. — Northrop Frye

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. — Northrop Frye

We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life. — Northrop Frye

Even the human heart is slightly left of centre. — Northrop Frye

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former. — Northrop Frye

Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths. — Northrop Frye

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

Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children's play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in "playing" chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for. — 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. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience. — Northrop Frye

The book is the world's most patient medium. — Northrop Frye

Authority is essential to society, but what we called in King Lear "transcendental" authority, with an executive ruler on top, depends on the ruler's understanding of equity. If he hasn't enough of such understanding, authority becomes a repressive legalism. Legalism of this sort really descends from what is called in the Bible the knowledge of good and evil. This was forbidden knowledge, because, as we'll see, it's not a genuine knowledge at all: it can't even tell us anything about good and evil. This kind of knowledge came into the world along with the discovery of self-conscious sex, when Adam and Eve knew that they were naked, and the thing that repressive legalism ever since has been most anxious to repress is the sexual impulse. — 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

Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind. — Northrop Frye

We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours. — Northrop Frye

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

The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means. — Northrop Frye

Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony; colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics. — Northrop Frye

Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity. — Northrop Frye

Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation ... — Northrop Frye

Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study. — Northrop Frye

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. — 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

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

It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here? — 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

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book. — Northrop Frye