Northrop Frye Quotes

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. (p. 8)

Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.

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.

A literary critic of experience never defines anything. (p. 4)

Posterity is the laziest and most incompetent of critics.

Art is not simply an identity of illusion and reality, but a counter-illusion: its world is a material world, but the material of an intelligible spiritual world. (1:73)

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

Metaphor is the language of immanence; metonymy of transcendence. (11C.21)

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.