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M. H. Abrams Quotes

1912–2015 United States

Meyer (Mike) Howard Abrams (23 July 1912 – 22 April 2015) was an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1971).

United States
Academics

Random M. H. Abrams quote

16 quotes

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

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

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

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

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable.

People's Education interview (2007)

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

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

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

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

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

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

It’s a pleasure that you don’t outgrow the anthology.

The New York Times dialogue with S. Greenblatt (2012)

He always violated your expectations. … He was a character.

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that.

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

If you don’t set your writing — and teaching — at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.

People's Education interview (2007)

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

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

All students are capable of growth.

People's Education interview (2007)

I think most of the things I published have been published out of desperation, not because they were perfected.

People's Education interview (2007)

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. I like to read Archie Ammons, my great friend. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: M. H. Abrams (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.