I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

Northrop Frye

Categorized in : Doe Literature Students

Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.

Northrop Frye

cat imagination blue

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

Northrop Frye

technology men book

The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts... Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.

Northrop Frye

independent emotional art

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

Northrop Frye

identity loss thinking

Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.

Northrop Frye

study imagination literature

Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, recognizes that it is man's destiny to unite and not divide, and understands that creating proletariats and scapegoats and second-class citizens is a mean and contemptible activity.

Northrop Frye

destiny real mean

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

Northrop Frye

mankind language way

Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.

Northrop Frye

centre humans heart

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

Northrop Frye

imagination literature reality

Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world.

Northrop Frye

body men world

The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.

Northrop Frye

taught atheism mind

We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.

Northrop Frye

notion educational preparation

We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.

Northrop Frye

infinity

The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.

Northrop Frye

literature answers thinking

The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.

Northrop Frye

simple home men

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.

Northrop Frye

body animal men

We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.

Northrop Frye

threat united-states culture

It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

Northrop Frye

surrender metaphor language

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

energy law art

My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .

Northrop Frye

educated pieces imagination