238 Quotes by Northrop Frye

Tendintele autoritate ale conservatorismului trebuie corectate prin mituri ale libertatii, in vreme ce un simt conservator al ordinii trebuie sa tempereze tendintele liberalismului spre iresponsabilitate sociala. Revolutionarul nu este decat un critic nepregatit, care confunda mitul libertatii cu realitatea, la fel cum un copil confunda actrita cu o printesa de basm reala.

All other statements of intention, however fully documented, are suspect. The poet may change his mind or mood; he may have intended one thing and done another, and then rationalised what he did.

Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make.

La macchina tecnologicamente più efficiente che l'uomo abbia mai inventato è il libro.

We do not live in centred space anymore, but have to create our own centres.

The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]

It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal shape is concerned, it will be equally mythical in either case. But we notice that any emphasis on shape or structure or pattern or form always throws a verbal narrative in the direction we call mythical rather than historical.(p.21)

The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing. [p.211]

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?