Frye Quotes

The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.
— The Educated Imagination

What does improve in the arts is the comprehension of them, and the refining of society which results from it. It is the consumer, not the producer, who benefits by culture, the consumer who becomes humanized and liberally educated. There is no reason why a great poet should be a wise and good man, or even a tolerable human being, but there is every reason why his reader should be improved in his humanity as a result of reading him.
— Anatomy of Criticism

I grew up in two towns, Sherbrooke and Moncton, where the population was half English and half French, divided by language, education and religion, and living in a state of more or less amiable Apartheid. In the Eastern Townships the English-speaking group formed a northern spur of New England, and had at a much earlier time almost annexed themselves to New England, feeling much more akin to it than to Quebec. The English-speaking Maritimers, also, had most of their cultural and economic ties with New England, but their political connexion was with new France, so that culturally, from their point of view, Canada stopped at Fredericton and started again at Westmount. There were also a good many Maritime French families whose native language was English, and so had the same cultural dislocation in reverse.
As a student going to the University of Toronto, I would take the train to Montreal, sitting up overnight in the coach, and looking forward to the moment in the early morning when the train came into Levis, on the south side of the St. Lawrence, and the great fortress of Quebec loomed out of the bleak dawn mists. I knew that much of the panorama was created by a modern railway hotel, but distance and fog lent enchantment even to that. Here was one of the imaginative and emotional centers of my own country and my own people, yet a people with whom I found it difficult to identify, what was different being not so much language as cultural memory. But the effort of making the identification was crucial: it helped me to see that a sense of unity is the opposite of a sense of uniformity. Uniformity, where everyone "belongs," uses the same clichés, thinks alike and behaves alike, produces a society which seems comfortable at first but is totally lacking in human dignity. 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. Unity, so understood, is the extra dimension that raises the sense of belonging into genuine human life. Nobody of any intelligence has any business being loyal to an ideal of uniformity: what one owes one's loyalty to is an ideal of unity, and a distrusts of such a loyalty is rooted in a distrust of life itself.
— The Bush Garden

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep. The native language takes precedence over every other subject of study: nothing else can compare with it in usefulness.
— The Educated Imagination

Literature is the world of the imagination — the place where anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
— The Educated Imagination

Literature encourages 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.
— The Educated Imagination

What produces the tolerance is the power of detachment in the imagination, where things are removed just out of reach of belief and action.
— The Educated Imagination

Literature as the science of human emotion — the constructs of the imagination tell us things about human life that we don't get in any other way….
— The Educated Imagination

The sense of escape, or at least detachment, does come into everybody's literary experience.
— The Educated Imagination

…writers are not acts of God; they come out of specific communities and are the individual points where those communities have become articulate.
— The Educated Imagination

There are two halves to literary experience…imagination gives us both a better and a worse world than the one we usually live with, and demands that we keep looking steadily at them both.
— The Educated Imagination

Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us as entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure in these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening.
— The Educated Imagination

Literature, has a lot to do with identifying the human world with the natural world around it, or finding analogies between them.
— The Educated Imagination

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

In other words, literature not only leads us toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don't like and want to get away from.
— The Educated Imagination

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

What we express badly, we do not know.
— The Educated Imagination

Literature is always an expression of primary concern.
— The Educated Imagination