same message no matter how often you consult it.
“The Scholar in Society” (1983), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
… nobody believes that a book is an object: it’s a focus of verbal energy.
Entry, Notes 53 (1989–90), 176, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 6.
The psychological effect of studying such a work as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind in paperback seems to me to be quite different from studying the same book in a hard cover. And by dramatizing the book as intellectual tool, the paperback also dramatized the extraordinary effectiveness of the book, the fact that, familiar and unobtrusive as it is, the book is one of the most efficient technological instruments ever developed in human history.
“The Renaissance of Books” (1973), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
Now that society, after some years of reeling from the impact of television, is beginning to bring it under control, we can see more clearly that the book is the chief technological device that makes democracy and the open society continuously possible.
“The Renaissance of Books” (1973), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2001), CW, 11.
But the book is actually a companion in dialogue: it helps to structure and make sense of the flood of automatic gabble that keeps rolling through the mind. This interior monologue, as it is called, never relates to other people, however often it is poured over them. Further, a book stays where it is, and does not vanish into ether or the garbage bin like the mass media.
“Preface to On Education” (1988), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
So the book becomes the focus of a community, as more and more people read it and are affected by it. It moves in the opposite direction from the introversion of what has been well called “the lonely crowd,” where no one can communicate with his neighbour because he is too close to him mentally to have anything to say.
“Preface to On Education” (1988), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Good books may instruct, but bad ones are more likely to inspire.
“Auguries of Experience” (1987), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
What we’d never see except in a book is often what we go to books to find.
“The Keys to Dreamland,” The Educated Imagination (1963), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
The document is also the focus of a community, the community of readers, and while this community may be restricted to one group for centuries, its natural tendency is to expand over the community as a whole. Thus it is only writing that makes democracy technically possible.
“Communications” (1970), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
It is necessary for one deeply interested in books to acquire the detachment from one’s reading that ordinary people have who are not much interested in them: to have something of their massive indifference which is not blown about by every wind of doctrine.
Entry, Notebook 3 (1946–48), Northrop Frye Newsletter, Fall 2000.
The success of a book that takes no risks is not worth achieving.
Entry, Notebook 47 (1989–90), 17, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 6.
The second-hand bookshop however represents something irreplaceable in one’s literary experience, and it is bound to revive sooner or later, if only as an aspect of the junk-antique business.
“The Renaissance of Books” (1973), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2001), CW, 11.
There are signs that in America and Britain, as in France, the paperbound book will become the salvation of the impoverished intellectual.
“The Church and Modern Culture” (1950), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
I have finished eleven books so far, but I have never finished any of them with the sense that I had succeeded or that I had achieved anything. I always finish them with a sense that they were simply being abandoned.…
“The Question of ‘Success’” (1967), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
A good book must delight and it must instruct. Anyone who desires to quarrel with or qualify that statement should take up some other occupation.
“On Book Reviewing” (1949), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
Borduas, Paul-Émile
For Borduas, the human mind contained an it as well as an I or ego, and this It was what he felt needed expression.
“Canadian Culture Today” (1977), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Boredom
I know it’s a difficult thing, but the great test of maturity is knowing when one is bored. I think that people are really bored out of their minds by what they get from the news media.
“The Great Test of Maturity” (1986), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
A man is bored because he bores himself.
“Leisure and Boredom” (1963), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
Borges, Jorge Luis
One of the wisest and shrewdest men of our time, the Argentine writer Borges, has remarked that literature not only begins in a mythology but also ends in one.
“Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism” (1969), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
Boston
When I was growing up in the Maritime Provinces during the [1920s], there was a strong political loyalty to Confederation, but an even stronger sense that Boston was our real capital, and that the Maritimes formed the periphery of New England, or what was often called “the Boston states.”
“Canadian Culture Today” (1977), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Bourgeois
The word “bourgeois” is practically synonymous with creative man: the middle class has produced culture and civilization alike.
Entry, Notebook 31 (late 1946–50), 8, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (2004), CW, 15.
The implication, which I’ve always accepted, is that God’s aim is to be a bourgeois, the middle class of the middle world, which means after upper & lower unrealities have vanished.
Entry, Notebook 50 (1987–90), 578, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
What
