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Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye Quotes

Literary critic

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Famous Northrop Frye Quotes

“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”

GivingHumansMayArtMatterWholeLiteratureCan DoImaginationRangeDimensionsArt And ScienceHuman Imagination
Book:Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962
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“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.”

IfsCharacterGamesBlackWhiteMoralPiecesPureOppositesChessQuestsBlack And WhiteTypicalCowardlyConfrontingChess GameGallant
Author:Northrop Frye
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“Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.”

LongSaidLastsLiteratureWorshipMoodHillsTemplesVersesSurvivedVirginsJupiter
Book:Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962
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“For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.”

PeopleGivingWritingLiteratureSoundEmotionSeriousReleaseFormulasConventionsMediocreExploitsGood Writers
Book:Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962
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“It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.”

ThinkingProcessKnownClearEmotionalPrejudiceStructureConvictionInsightIntuitionBlockPsychologicalPanicIrrationalImitationElusiveInertiaStumblingGleamInvoluntaryPhysiologicalEntanglement
Book:Anatomy of Criticism
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