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Northrop Frye quotes - page 6
At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't.
Northrop Frye
We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work.
Northrop Frye
The use of cliché [is] the use of ready-made, prefabricated formulas designed to give those who are too lazy think the illusion of thinking.
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.
Northrop Frye
But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.
Northrop Frye
I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.
Northrop Frye
Finnegans Wake is not a book to read, but a book to decipher:.
Northrop Frye
Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him.
Northrop Frye
Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.
Northrop Frye
The objective world is only "material”: it's there, but it could be there in a great many different forms and aspects...Even here there [are] still possibilities.
Northrop Frye
The wise man looks for the invisible line between the "is" and the "is not" which is the way through.
Northrop Frye
The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure.
Northrop Frye
The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve.'
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
The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work.
Northrop Frye
At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.
Northrop Frye
One of the most obvious uses [of literature], 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.
Northrop Frye
The use of cliché [is] the use of ready-made, prefabricated formulas designed to give those who are too lazy think the illusion of thinking...If our aim is only to say what gets by in society, our reactions will become almost completely mechanical. That's the direction cliché takes us in...it's no more a product of a conscious mind than the bark of a dog.
Northrop Frye
Man is born lost in a forest. If he is obsessed by the thereness of the forest, he stays lost and goes in circles; if he assumes the forest is not there, he keeps bumping into trees. The wise man looks for the invisible line between the "is" and the "is not" which is the way through. The street in the city, the highway in the desert, the pathway of the planets through the labyrinth of the stars, are parallel forms. (1:111)
Northrop Frye
The objective world is only "material”: it's there, but it could be there in a great many different forms and aspects...Even here there [are] still possibilities: it can't be just anything. But perhaps extracting a finite schema from the variety of mythologies, literatures, or religions might contribute something to the understanding of what some of these possibilities could be. The individual can't create his own world, except in art or fantasy: society can only create a myth of concern. What fun if one could get just a peep at what some of the other worlds are that a new humanity could create–no, live in. (p. 287-8)
Northrop Frye
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