Top 15 Northrop Frye Quotes

Canadian literary critic and literary theorist (1912–1991)

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Herman Northrop Frye (14 July 1912 – 23 January 1991) was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.

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Continuous prose suggests complete identification with the representing, observing, immersing-in-object self. Aphorisms suggest a richer & varied personality made up more of internal conflicts and decisions. An epiphanic sequence suggests the highest mystery of personality. (33.47)

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

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

The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology. (21.101)

Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody ever writes his dream book. (33.54)

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

Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world. (19.333)

I have a notion that a prolonged period of solitude & fasting would produce hallucinations, & that these would be mandalas and such: they would be the essential forms in which "outer" perceptions are organized. (18.23)

I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.’ That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the university...There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being carried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities.

You can never get rid of God as long as you continue to use words, because all words are part of the Word. (p. 871)

[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)

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

I'm a Blakean, a visionary disciple...But I'm always torn between feeling that the cock crows because he has a vision of the dawn, or because he feels stimulated by standing on top of a pile horseshit. (1942, entry #24)

We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit. (p. 325)

In imaginative thought there is no real knowledge of anything but similarities (ultimately identities): knowledge of differences is merely a transition to a new knowledge of similarities. (p. 215)