Northrop Frye Quotes

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. (p. 70)

Freedom has nothing to do with lack of training; it can only be the product of training. You're not free to move unless you've learned to walk, and not free to play the piano unless you practise. Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use the language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at.

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 distinctive enough to be patented.

This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.(pg.18)

The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.

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.

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. (1:399)

Belief has nothing to do with knowledge, & credo ut intelligam [I believe in order that I might understand] is horseshit. (p. 209)

We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.

Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.

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.

Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.

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. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself.