Northrop Frye quotes - page 5

If you haven't got an excremental vision you have no business setting up as a major satirist. (Northrop Frye)
Belief has nothing to do with knowledge, & credo ut intelligam [I believe in order that I might understand] is horseshit. View quote
Northrop Frye
I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.' That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That's what's so important about the humanities in the uni­versity...There's something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being car­ried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities. View quote
Northrop Frye
If I had been on the hills of Bethlehem in the year one, I do not think I should have heard angels singing because I do not hear them now, & there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped. View quote
Northrop Frye
Under the stimulation of a "great age" or certain period of clarity in art a wider diffusion of genius becomes actual suggests to me that it is always potential. View quote
Northrop Frye
I have never had the sort of experience the mystics talk about, never felt a revelation of reality through or beyond nature, never felt like Adam in Paradise, never felt, in direct experience, that the world is wholly other than it seems...The nearest I have come to such experiences are glimpses of my own creative powers...and these are moments or intervals of inspiration rather than vision. I'm not sure that I want it unless I can have clarity about other things with it. View quote
Northrop Frye
Metaphor is the language of immanence; metonymy of transcendence. View quote
Northrop Frye
[What Poets Say:]. View quote
Northrop Frye
The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination. View quote
Northrop Frye
We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time. View quote
Northrop Frye
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats. (Northrop Frye)
Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn't just train the mind: it's a social and moral development too. View quote
Northrop Frye
My greater simplicity came from a deeper level than the labyrinth of the brain. View quote
Northrop Frye
The Great Code was a silly and sloppy book. It was also a work of very great genius. The point is that genius is not enough. A book worthy of God and of Helen [Frye's wife] must do better than that. View quote
Northrop Frye
The real Bible is a sealed book, an apocryphon, a book not to be opened (mentally) until its time has come. View quote
Northrop Frye
The worst thing we can say about God is that he knows all. The best thing we can say of him is that, on the whole, he tends to keep his knowledge to himself. View quote
Northrop Frye
The soul is an immaculate virgin...Then it goes out and gets fucked by the world all day long & staggers back a baggy-eyed old whore, still hoping that after a sleep the Moment of purification will come again. View quote
Northrop Frye
Nobody seriously thinks of television as a viewer's mode of perception...No matter how much he wants people to look at his product, the advertiser doesn't realize that television is [the viewer's] way of looking at him, & not his way of reaching them. View quote
Northrop Frye
An aphorism is not a cliche: it penetrates & bites. It has wit, and consequently an affinity with satire...Christ speaks in aphorisms, not because they are alive, but because he is. View quote
Northrop Frye
Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world. View quote
Northrop Frye
Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody every writes his dream book. (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. View quote
Northrop Frye
I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as the time was, it provided some parallels with Blake's time which were useful for understanding Blake's attitude to the world. View quote
Northrop Frye
For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at ay time may crash around our ears. View quote
Northrop Frye
The poet's job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place. He gives you the typical, recurring, or what Aristotle calls universal event. View quote
Northrop Frye