Quote

Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.

Northrop Frye

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Northrop Frye
Age: 78 †
Born: 1912
Born: July 14
Died: 1991
Died: January 23
Cleric
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Poet
Writer
Prose
Attempt
Writing
Aphorisms
Aphorism
Continuous
Translate
Consists

More quotes by Northrop Frye

Image
The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
Northrop Frye
Image
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
Northrop Frye
Image
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
Image
Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
Northrop Frye
Image
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
Northrop Frye
Image
No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself
Northrop Frye
Image
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
Image
There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.
Northrop Frye
Image
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
Northrop Frye
Image
Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it, they are idealized as simply gallant or pure if they obstruct it, they are characterized as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character...tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess game.
Northrop Frye
Image
Americans like to make money Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.
Northrop Frye
Image
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
Image
It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question Who am I? than by some such riddle as Where is here?
Northrop Frye
Image
Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.
Northrop Frye
Image
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
Northrop Frye
Image
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Northrop Frye
Image
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
Northrop Frye
Image
We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
Northrop Frye
Image
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
Northrop Frye
Image
This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
Northrop Frye