Northrop Frye
Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children's play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in "playing" chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for.Collection: Children
Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony; colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Religion
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.Collection: Strong
We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.Collection: Space
The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.Collection: Focus
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.Collection: Book
The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.Collection: Intelligent
Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.Collection: Fall
The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about Newton's time most people took the "up" of heaven and the "down" of hell to be more or less descriptive.Collection: People
We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.Collection: Imagination
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.Collection: Reading
We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.Collection: Dream
The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.Collection: Character
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. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.Collection: Art
I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.Collection: Fundamentals
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]Collection: Believe
Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.Collection: Benefits
Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.Collection: Children
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.Collection: Literature
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.Collection: Character
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.Collection: Sleep
Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.Collection: Art
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.Collection: Unity
The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.Collection: Book
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.Collection: Writing
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.Collection: Poetic
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.Collection: Book
The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Long
Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.Collection: Healthy
The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.Collection: Supremacy
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.Collection: Philosophy
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.Collection: Literature
The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.Collection: Mean
Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writerenters intoa structure of traditional stories and images.Collection: Principles
Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.Collection: Teaching
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.Collection: Imagination
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.Collection: War
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 language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience.Collection: Art
The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.Collection: Home
A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.Collection: Criticism
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 itselfCollection: Art
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.Collection: Men
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?Collection: Important
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.Collection: Egypt
One of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance... Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.Collection: Art
Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting ofCollection: Art