Northrop Frye Quotes

If you haven't got an excremental vision you have no business setting up as a major satirist. (2:578-9)

Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.

The total simultaneous pattern always extend from alpha to omega. (21.190)

As civilization develops, we become more preoccupied with human life, and less conscious of our relation to non-human nature. Literature reflects this, and the more advanced the civilization, the more literature seems to concern itself with purely human problems and conflicts. The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves.

In society's eyes the virtue of saying the right thing at the right time is more important that the virtue of telling the whole truth, or even of telling the truth at all.

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.

[Students] have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don’t know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach. (p. 746)

The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time.

Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.

One should have bigger & better conversions everyday, like a mechanized phoenix. (21.495)

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. (2:716)

The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.

Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.

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.

The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.