Frye Quotes & Sayings

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

Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive or an individual women's erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal which happens to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices ... Those definitions ... are about the oppression and exploitation of women by men. — Marilyn 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 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

Catsuits were big for me in the '90s, and I had many of them. Even catsuits with shorts in them. — Soleil Moon Frye

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

My strategy is just to attack, attack and attack. — Don 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

The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye. — Paul Fry

I used to be a free spirit. — Soleil Moon 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

Everything we did was a first: first bath, first walk, first drive in the car. It was like we walked into an alternate universe that looked just like the old one, but all the rules were different and we had to relearn how to live. — Soleil Moon 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 only knowledge that is worthwhile, writes Northrop Frye. is the knowledge that leafs to wisdom, for knowledge without wisdom is a body without life. — Leland Ryken

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

I had such a hard time finding great organic and non-toxic items for my daughter. — Soleil Moon Frye

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. — Northrop Frye

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

What is it about separation, in any or all of its many forms and degrees, that makes it so basic and so sinister, so exciting and so repellent? — Marilyn Frye

Eventually, I'll go back to acting, but for right now, my children are the most important thing in the world to me. — Soleil Moon 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

Master, don't kill me. Let me live - punish me - torture me - but let me live. I can't face God with all those lives on my conscience, all that blood on my hands. — Dwight Frye

The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one's life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped. — Marilyn Frye

I used to be encouraged when, after a Sunday's message, people would say, "John, that was a good message. You showed me things from that verse that I never would have seen. I don't know how you do it. Thanks so much." Howard Hendricks called this postservice time "the glorification of the worm. — John W. Frye

I love America. You always hurt the one you love. — David 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

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns. — 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

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like — Northrop Frye

I know there are parents who are very structured and organized and are certainly far more together than I am, it's just not me. — Soleil Moon Frye

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

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

I want kids to know that it is okay to make a change in order to feel better about themselves. — Soleil Moon Frye

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

It's so important and easy to be a kid at heart. — Soleil Moon Frye

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

It is easy to see how quickly expectations become layered, competitive and conflicting. This is how the shame web works. We have very few realistic options that allow us to meet any of these expectations. Most of the options that we do have feel like a "double bind." When Marilyn Frye describes a double bind as "a situation in which options are very limited and all of them expose us to penalty, censure or deprivation. — Brene Brown

We do not live in centred space anymore, but have to create our own centres. — 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

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

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

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

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

I want to ask heterosexual academic feminists to do some hard analytical and reflective work. To begin, I want to say to them: — Marilyn Frye

I would like you to rise each morning and know that you are heterosexual and that you choose to be heterosexual - that you are and choose to be a member of a privileged and dominant class, one of your privileges being not to notice. — Marilyn 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

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

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

I love social media and the ability to connect to new people through Twitter and Facebook and share my real time experiences with my mommy network. — Soleil Moon 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

The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically , as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy. — 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

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

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism. — 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

No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies. — 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

I wish you would stop and seriously consider, as a broad and long-term feminist political strategy, the conversion of women to a woman-identified and woman-directed sexuality and eroticism, as a way of breaking the grip of men on women's minds and women's bodies, of removing women from the chronic attachment to the primary situations of sexual and physical violence that is rained upon women by men, and as a way of promoting women's firm and reliable bonding against oppression ... — Marilyn 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

I love being pregnant! — Soleil Moon Frye

The eyes healed in a matter of a few days, as eyes heal quickly, mine just heal faster than anybody else. I was back in the strip club hours later rehabbing my eyes. — Don 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

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

Frye's influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence. — Harold Bloom

I wanted to create a place where parents can come and find products that are safe for their children, as well as good for the planet. — Soleil Moon 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

Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status. — Northrop Frye

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

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

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. — 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

The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death. — Northrop Frye

(U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us. — 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

It's never too early to involve your kids in giving back. And the more hands-on the experiences are, the better. — Soleil Moon Frye

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

Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis. — Roger Ebert