Northrop Frye Quotes
-
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
-
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
-
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
-
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
-
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.
-
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
-
Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.
-
Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
-
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.
-
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
-
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.