01UndatedThe poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
02UndatedFor the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
03Undated(U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
04UndatedIllusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation…Northrop Frye / quote ↗
05UndatedSo, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, 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. It's possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
06UndatedLiterature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
07UndatedLiterature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
08UndatedA person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
09UndatedWhat the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
10UndatedWisdom is the central form which gives meaning and position to all the facts which are acquired by knowledge, the digestion and assimilation of whatever in the material world the man comes in contact with.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
11UndatedThe traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
12UndatedI feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I've felt that it was really a part of me, and I hope I'll have that feeling again, and that next time it won't go away. That's a dim, misty outline of the story that's told so often, of how man once lived in a golden age or a garden of Eden or the Hesperides ... how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again. ... This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
13UndatedA snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
14UndatedThe motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
15UndatedThe most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
16UndatedAmericans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it. I know no country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
17UndatedSeparatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
18UndatedWe 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 / quote ↗
19UndatedOur country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
20UndatedThe human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
21UndatedWe must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
23UndatedThe bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.Northrop Frye / quote ↗
