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Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.
Northrop Frye -
Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience.
Northrop Frye
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The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
Northrop Frye -
A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
Northrop Frye -
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
Northrop Frye -
We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop Frye -
Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
Northrop Frye -
The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
Northrop Frye
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The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.
Northrop Frye -
We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.
Northrop Frye -
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
Northrop Frye -
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
Northrop Frye -
No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.
Northrop Frye -
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
Northrop Frye
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Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.
Northrop Frye -
The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.
Northrop Frye -
Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of
Northrop Frye -
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
Northrop Frye -
A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.
Northrop Frye -
Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.
Northrop Frye
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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.
Northrop Frye -
Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children's play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in "playing" chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for.
Northrop Frye -
Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.
Northrop Frye -
Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
Northrop Frye