238 Quotes by Northrop Frye

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.

Between religion’s this is and poetry’s but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.

Advertising – a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory.

The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for “literalists,” becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.

The entire Bible, viewed as a “divine comedy,” is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.

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.

The purest human act, and a model for all human acts, is an informative, creative act which transforms a world that is merely objective, set against us, in which we feel lonely and frightened and unwanted, into a home.

The upper class made their names for the lower classes – villain, knave, varlet, boor – into terms of contempt because the people they described had to wriggle through life as best they could: their first and almost their only rule was survival. The deadliest insult one gentleman could give another then was to call him a liar, not because the one being insulted had a passion for truth, but because it was being suggested that he couldn’t afford to tell the truth.