Northrop Frye Quotes

55 quotes in 873 categories

• In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention…
• We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
• 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…
• 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.
• Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
• Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental…
• The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
• We do not live in centred space anymore, but have to create our own centres.
• A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
• 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…
• To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
• One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
• We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.
• No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us.…
• 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…
• Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

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