Northrop Frye quotes - page 3

In society's eyes the virtue of saying the right thing at the right time is more important that the virtue of telling the whole truth, or even of telling the truth at all. (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 is still with us. View quote
Northrop Frye
The total simultaneous pattern always extend from alpha to omega. View quote
Northrop Frye
Art is not simply an identity of illusion and reality, but a counter-illusion: its world is a material world, but the material of an intelligible spiritual world. View quote
Northrop Frye
The mark of a great writer: who sees his own time, but with a detachment that makes him communicable to other ages. View quote
Northrop Frye
Jargon or gobbledygook, or what people who live in Washington or Ottawa call "federal prose," [is] the gabble of abstractions and vague words which avoids any simple or direct statement.... Direct and simple language always has some force behind it, and the writers of gobbledygook don't want to be forceful; they want to be soothing and reassuring. View quote
Northrop Frye
I give the impression of elusiveness sometimes, and rightly, because I really do have an inner chamber in my temple I'm not mature enough to open. View quote
Northrop Frye
Yesterday's kook book becomes tomorrow's standard text. View quote
Northrop Frye
Continuous prose suggests complete identification with the representing, observing, immersing-in-object self. Aphorisms suggest a richer & varied personality made up more of internal conflicts and decisions. An epiphanic sequence suggests the highest mystery of personality. View quote
Northrop Frye
There's something in all of us that wants to drift toward a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we use words, we're either righting against this tendency or giving in to it. When we fight against it, we're taking the side of genuine and permanent human civilization. View quote
Northrop Frye
In literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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]. View quote
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. View quote
Northrop Frye
We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit. View quote
Northrop Frye
The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice. View quote
Northrop Frye
I must have God on my own terms, because God on somebody else's terms is an idol. View quote
Northrop Frye
A literary critic of experience never defines anything. View quote
Northrop Frye
Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it. View quote
Northrop Frye
[Students] have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don't know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach. (Northrop Frye)
As civilization develops, we become more preoccupied with human life, and less conscious of our relation to non-human nature. Literature reflects this, and the more advanced the civilization, the more literature seems to concern itself with purely human problems and conflicts. The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves. View quote
Northrop Frye
You can never get rid of God as long as you continue to use words, because all words are part of the Word. View quote
Northrop Frye
The poet...is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life. View quote
Northrop Frye
I don`t want the reduction of religion to aesthetics, but the abolition of aesthetics & incorporating of art with the Word of God. View quote
Northrop Frye