Quotes by Northrop Frye

“For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.”

“(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.”

“The 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 co...”

“So, 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?...”

“Literature 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 ab...”

“Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation”

“Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.”

“A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.”

“What 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 liter...”

“Wisdom 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 conta...”

“Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahabs quest for the whale may be mad and monomaniacal, as it is frequ...”

“The 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 ...”

“I 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...”

“A 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.”

“The 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 y...”

“Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.”

“The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.”

“Americans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it. I know no country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.”

“Historically a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.”

“Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.”