Northrop Frye Quotes

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)

My greater simplicity came from a deeper level than the labyrinth of the brain. (1:61-2)

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.

Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.

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.

Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world.

The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.

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.

The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.

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

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

The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared.

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

I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.

We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.