"I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.’ That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the university...There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being carried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities."

"You can never get rid of God as long as you continue to use words, because all words are part of the Word. (p. 871)"

"[Students] have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don’t know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach. (p. 746)"

"A literary critic of experience never defines anything. (p. 4)"

"I'm a Blakean, a visionary disciple...But I'm always torn between feeling that the cock crows because he has a vision of the dawn, or because he feels stimulated by standing on top of a pile horseshit. (1942, entry #24)"

"We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit. (p. 325)"

"In imaginative thought there is no real knowledge of anything but similarities (ultimately identities): knowledge of differences is merely a transition to a new knowledge of similarities. (p. 215)"

"Belief has nothing to do with knowledge, & credo ut intelligam [I believe in order that I might understand] is horseshit. (p. 209)"

"A community`s art is its spiritual vision. (p. 206)"

"Nothing is more remarkable in the Bible than the absence of argument...Argument is internal continuity. So is logical sequence in narrative: in the Bible the connectives are just "and." (p. 200)"

"Education is a set of analogies to a genuinely human existence, of which the arts are the model. Merely human life is of course a demonic analogy or parody of genuinely human life. (p. 149)"

"An aphorism is not a cliche: it penetrates & bites. It has wit, and consequently an affinity with satire...Christ speaks in aphorisms, not because they are alive, but because he is. (p. 108)"

"The "flow of information," which is mostly misinformation, is actually a presentation of myths. And people are increasingly rejecting the prescribed myths & developing their own counter-myths. (p. 97)"

"Nobody seriously thinks of television as a viewer's mode of perception...No matter how much he wants people to look at his product, the advertiser doesn't realize that television is [the viewer's] way of looking at him, & not his way of reaching them. (p. 95-6)"

"If I had been on the hills of Bethlehem in the year one, I do not think I should have heard angels singing because I do not hear them now, & there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped.(p. 74)"

"The soul is an immaculate virgin...Then it goes out and gets fucked by the world all day long & staggers back a baggy-eyed old whore, still hoping that after a sleep the Moment of purification will come again. (p. 27)"

"Under the stimulation of a "great age" or certain period of clarity in art a wider diffusion of genius becomes actual suggests to me that it is always potential. (p. 8)"

"Genius is a power of the soul and that powers of the soul can be developed by everyone. (p. 8)"

"I don`t want the reduction of religion to aesthetics, but the abolition of aesthetics & incorporating of art with the Word of God. (p. 7)"

"One of the major activities of art consists in sharpening the edge of platitudes to make them enter the soul as realities. (p. 7)"

"The objective world is only “material”: it’s there, but it could be there in a great many different forms and aspects...Even here there [are] still possibilities: it can’t be just anything. But perhaps extracting a finite schema from the variety of mythologies, literatures, or religions might contribute something to the understanding of what some of these possibilities could be. The individual can’t create his own world, except in art or fantasy: society can only create a myth of concern. What fun if one could get just a peep at what some of the other worlds are that a new humanity could create–no, live in. (p. 287-8)"

"I must have God on my own terms, because God on somebody else’s terms is an idol. (p. 61)"

"I have never had the sort of experience the mystics talk about, never felt a revelation of reality through or beyond nature, never felt like Adam in Paradise, never felt, in direct experience, that the world is wholly other than it seems...The nearest I have come to such experiences are glimpses of my own creative powers...and these are moments or intervals of inspiration rather than vision. I’m not sure that I want it unless I can have clarity about other things with it. (p. 60–1)"

"What’s transcendental in Blake is not the statically geometrical, but the sense of arrested energy: the wriggling vines & snakes, flames & the like...It’s an expression of the belief that every object is an event. (p. 14)"

"I give the impression of elusiveness sometimes, and rightly, because I really do have an inner chamber in my temple I'm not mature enough to open. (2:618)"

"The mark of a great writer: who sees his own time, but with a detachment that makes him communicable to other ages. (2:579)"

"If you haven't got an excremental vision you have no business setting up as a major satirist. (2:578-9)"

"The worst thing we can say about God is that he knows all. The best thing we can say of him is that, on the whole, he tends to keep his knowledge to himself. (2:568)"

"The real Bible is a sealed book, an apocryphon, a book not to be opened (mentally) until its time has come. (2:568)"

"Yesterday's kook book becomes tomorrow's standard text. (2:495)"

"We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity. (1:281)"

"Finnegans Wake is a kind of hypnagogic structure, words reverberating on themselves without pointing to objects...This may be the hallucinatory verbal world within which God speaks. (1:399)"

"Northrop Frye / Whatta guy / Reads more books than you or I"

"Giving further impetus to literary study of the Bible was the work of several scholars of English and comparative literature, who extended their expertise in the analysis of literature to biblical texts. Most prominent were Northrop Frye ( The Great Code: The Bible and Literature), Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Poetry), and Frank Kermode (The Genesis of Secrecy, a study of the Gospel of Mark)."

"Norrie is not struggling for his place in the sun. He is the sun."

"What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism."

"Continuous prose suggests complete identification with the representing, observing, immersing-in-object self. Aphorisms suggest a richer & varied personality made up more of internal conflicts and decisions. An epiphanic sequence suggests the highest mystery of personality. (33.47)"

"Metaphor is the language of immanence; metonymy of transcendence. (11C.21)"

"One should have bigger & better conversions everyday, like a mechanized phoenix. (21.495)"

"The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology. (21.101)"

"We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks."

"The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared."

"Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself."

"I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse."

"We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it."

"Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a "type" or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is a typology in a special sense."

"The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning."

"Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading."

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

"The first thing that confronts us in studying verbal structures is that they are arranged sequentially, and have to be read or listened to in time."