Northrop Frye Quotes
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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.
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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.
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The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
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We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.
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Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
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Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
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Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.
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To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like