Quotes from Northrop Frye

The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves. In Shakespeare we can still have heroes who can see ghosts and talk in magnificent poetry, but by the time we get to Beckett's Waiting for Godot they're speaking prose and have turned into ghosts themselves.

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

Honest critics are continually finding blind spots in their taste: they discover the possibility of recognizing a valid form of poetic experience without being able to realize it for themselves.

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the languages of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music.

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.

If Shakespeare were alive now, no doubt he'd be interviewed every week and his opinions canvassed on every subject from national foreign policy to the social effects of punk rock. But in his day nobody cared what Shakespeare's views were about anything, and he wouldn't have been allowed to discuss public affairs publicly. He wasn't, therefore, under a constant pressure to become opinionated.

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 secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal.

Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate experience. The poet uses images and objects and sensations much more than he uses abstract ideas; the novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments.

People don't get into planes because they want to fly, they get into planes because they want to get somewhere else faster. What's produced the aeroplane is not so much a desire to fly as a rebellion against the tyranny of time and space.

The story of loss and regaining of identity is the framework, I think, of all literature

the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality.

The Canada to which we really do owe loyalty is the Canada that we have failed to create.

The moral of all this is that with Shakespeare the actable and the theatrical are always what comes first.

Remember too that to me the word myth, like the words fable and fiction, is a technical term in criticism, and the popular sense in which it means something untrue I regard as a debasing of language.

If the general shape and structure of the story is prescribed in advance, then—this is our second critical principle—all the literary merits of the story, the wit in the dialogue, the liveliness of the characterization, and the like, are a technical tour de force. They illustrate the author's rhetorical skill in working within his conventions.

As nothing is certain or permanent in the world, nothing either real or unreal, the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal. All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them.

In this perspective what I like or don't like disappears, because there's nothing left of me as a separate person: as a reader of literature I exist only as a representative of humanity as a whole. We

This is an example of why the humanists have always insisted that you don't learn to think wholly from one language: you learn to think better from linguistic conflict, from bouncing one language off another.

We then discover that we have no word, corresponding to "poem" in poetry or "play" in drama, to describe a work of literary art. It is all very well for Blake to say that to generalize is to be an idiot, but when we find ourselves in the cultural situation of savages who have words for ash and willow and no word for tree, we wonder if there is not such a thing as being too deficient in the capacity to generalize.

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

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.

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.

Anyone measuring his mind against an external reality has to fall back on an axiom of faith.