M. H. Abrams Quotes

"Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions."

"The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives."

"The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'"

"When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas."

"It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable."

"Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading."

"If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem."

"John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student."

"The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves."

"We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background."

"When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect."

"If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false."

"We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity."

"We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture."

"The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively."

"Jews had an outsider's eye on a lot of Western tradition."

"I was never a monist - always a diversitarian."

"If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem."