Northrop Frye Quotes

The use of cliché [is] the use of ready-made, prefabricated formulas designed to give those who are too lazy think the illusion of thinking...If our aim is only to say what gets by in society, our reactions will become almost completely mechanical. That's the direction cliché takes us in...it's no more a product of a conscious mind than the bark of a dog.

The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life...is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.

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.

When you stop to think about it, you soon realize that our imagination is what our whole social life is really based on....In practically everything we do it's the combination of emotion and intellect we call imagination that goes to work.

The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.

Finnegans Wake is not a book to read, but a book to decipher: as Joyce says, it's about a dreamer, but it's addressed to an ideal reader suffering from ideal insomnia.

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.

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

No matter what direction we start off in, the signposts of literature always keep pointing the same way, to a world where nothing is outside the imagination. If even time, the enemy of all living things, and to poets, the most hated and feared of all tyrants, can be broken down by the imagination, anything can be.

Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it.

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.

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.

The poet...is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life.

We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.

The human mind is [a poet's] individual mind at first, but as soon as he writes a poem it becomes our [the readers'] minds too. There is no self-expression in [a poet's] poem, because once the poem is there the individual [poet] has disappeared. ...there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature.