Northrop Frye quotes - page 4

One should have bigger & better conversions everyday, like a mechanized phoenix. (Northrop Frye)
There can be no free speech in a mob: free speech is one thing a mob can't stand. View quote
Northrop Frye
What's transcendental in Blake is not the statically geometrical, but the sense of arrested energy: the wriggling vines & snakes, flames & the like...It's an expression of the belief that every object is an event. View quote
Northrop Frye
The human mind is [a poet's] individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our [the readers'] minds too. There is no self-expression in [a poet's] poem, because once the poem is there the individual [poet] has disappeared. ...there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature. View quote
Northrop Frye
The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared. View quote
Northrop Frye
All texts are incarnational, and the climax of the entire Christian Bible, "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," is the most logocentric sentence ever written. View quote
Northrop Frye
Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favour with its original audience as a new generation up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of "quaint" and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive. View quote
Northrop Frye
Education is a set of analogies to a genuinely human existence, of which the arts are the model. Merely human life is of course a demonic analogy or parody of genuinely human life. View quote
Northrop Frye
...there is something about time and space that is not real, and something about us that is. However man may have tumbled into this world of indefinite space, he does not belong to it at all. Real space for him is the eternal here; where we are is always the center of the universe, and the circumference of the universe, just as real time is the 'eternal Now' of our personal experience. View quote
Northrop Frye
The "flow of information," which is mostly misinformation, is actually a presentation of myths. And people are increasingly rejecting the prescribed myths & developing their own counter-myths. View quote
Northrop Frye
One person by himself is not a complete human being. (Northrop Frye)
A community`s art is its spiritual vision. View quote
Northrop Frye
I have a notion that a prolonged period of solitude & fasting would produce hallucinations, & that these would be mandalas and such: they would be the essential forms in which "outer" perceptions are organized. View quote
Northrop Frye
When you stop to think about it, you soon realize that our imagination is what our whole social life is really based on.... In practically everything we do it's thee combination of emotion and intellect we call imagination that goes to work. View quote
Northrop Frye
Genius is a power of the soul and that powers of the soul can be developed by everyone. View quote
Northrop Frye
The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life...is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in. View quote
Northrop Frye
Finnegans Wake is a kind of hypnagogic structure, words reverberating on themselves without pointing to objects...This may be the hallucinatory verbal world within which God speaks. View quote
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. View quote
Northrop Frye
Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process. View quote
Northrop Frye
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions. View quote
Northrop Frye
All writers are conventional, because all writers have the same problem of transferring their language from direct speech to the imagination. 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)
One of the major activities of art consists in sharpening the edge of platitudes to make them enter the soul as realities. View quote
Northrop Frye
In imaginative thought there is no real knowledge of anything but similarities (ultimately identities): knowledge of differences is merely a transition to a new knowledge of similarities. View quote
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. View quote
Northrop Frye
No matter what direction we start off in, the signposts of literature always keep pointing the same way, to a world where nothing is outside the imagination. If even time, the enemy of all living things, and to poets, the most hated and feared of all tyrants, can be broken down by the imagination, anything can be. View quote
Northrop Frye