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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.

-Northrop Frye

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Characters Tend To Be

Northrop Frye

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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.

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Teaching Literature Is Impossible; That Is Why It Is Difficult.

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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.

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.

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Those Who Do Succeed In Reading The Bible From Beginning To End Will Discover That At Least It Has A Beginning And An End, And Some Traces Of A Total Structure.

Man Creates What He Calls History As A Screen To Conceal The Workings Of The Apocalypse From Himself.

We Find Rhetorical Situations Everywhere In Life, And Only Our Imaginations Can Get Us Out Of Them.

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.

Literature Is Not A Subject Of Study, But An Object Of Study.

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Most Of My Writing Consists Of An Attempt To Translate Aphorisms Into Continuous Prose.

One Doesn't Bother To Believe The Credible: The Credible Is Believed Already, By Definition. There's No Adventure Of The Mind.

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.

The Simple Point Is That Literature Belongs To The World Man Constructs, Not To The World He Sees; To His Home, Not His Environment.

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.

The Primary And Literal Meaning Of The Bible, Then, Is Its Centripetal Or Poetic Meaning.

It Is Of The Essence Of Imaginative Culture That It Transcends The Limits Both Of The Naturally Possible And Of The Morally Acceptable.

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We Have To Look At The Figures Of Speech A Writer Uses, His Images And Symbols, To Realize That Underneath All The Complexity Of Human Life That Uneasy Stare At An Alien Nature Is Still Haunting Us, And The Problem Of Surmounting It Still With Us.

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I See A Sequence Of Seven Main Phases: Creation,revolution Or Exodus (israel In Egypt), Law, Wisdom, Prophecy, Gospel, And Apocalypse.

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.

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.

We Notice As The Bible Goes On, The Area Of Scared Space Shrinks.

Literature Begins With The Possible Model Of Experience, And What It Produces Is The Literary Model We Call The Classic.

Man Is Constantly Building Anxiety-structures, Like Geodesic Domes, Around His Social And Religious Institutions.

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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.

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The Objective World Is The Order Of Nature, Thinking Or Reflection Follows The Suggestions Of Sense Experience, And Words Are The Servomechanisms Of Reflection.

[science Fiction Is] A Mode Of Romance With A Strong Inherent Tendency To Myth.

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Black And White

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Wherever Illiteracy Is A Problem, It's As Fundamental A Problem As Getting Enough To Eat Or A Place To Sleep.

The Fable Says That The Tortoise Won In The End, Which Is Consoling, But The Hare Shows A Good Deal Of Speed And Few Signs Of Tiring.

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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.

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.

The Tremendous Efficiency And Economy Of The Book Has Once Again Demonstrated Itself. It's The World's Most Patient Medium.

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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.

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.

War Appeals To Young Men Because It Is Fundamentally Auto-eroticism.

In Literature, Questions Of Fact Or Truth Are Subordinated To The Primary Literary Aims Of Producing A Structure Of Words For Its Own Sake, And The Sign-values Of Symbols Are Subordinated To Their Importance As A Structure Of Interconnected Motifs.

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.

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?

Nobody Is Capable Of Of Free Speech Unless He Knows How To Use Language, And Such Knowledge Is Not A Gift: It Has To Learned And Worked At.

To Bring Anything Really To Life In Literature We Can't Be Lifelike: We Have To Be Literature-like

The Simplest Questions Are The Hardest To Answer.

Poetry Can Only Be Made Out Of Other Poems; Novels Out Of Other Novels.

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