Quotable Quotes - M. H. Abrams quotes

M. H. Abrams quotes

“Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.” — M. H. Abrams

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“I've always been surprised at the degree of success of The Mirror and the Lamp and duration of esteem for it. I had no reason to expect in 1953 that it would appeal to more than a specialized group interested in literary criticism.” — M. H. Abrams

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“If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.” — M. H. Abrams

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“If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.” — M. H. Abrams

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“It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.” — M. H. Abrams

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“John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.” — M. H. Abrams

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“Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.” — M. H. Abrams

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“Natural Supernaturalism is quite well known and even used as a textbook, but it never seems to have attracted the acclaim of its predecessor.” — M. H. Abrams

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“Rap is far from an abstract, dematerialized mode of utterance. I hate a lot of rap because it's bad stuff, but it does emphasize the articulatory aspect of the words.” — M. H. Abrams

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“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.” — M. H. Abrams

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“The Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory was a supposedly secret lab in the basement of Memorial Hall at Harvard.” — M. H. Abrams

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“The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.” — M. H. Abrams

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“The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.” — M. H. Abrams

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“The title, Natural Supernaturalism, is harder to pronounce than The Mirror and the Lamp, which is a title quoted from William Butler Yeats. People get the title wrong in all sorts of ways. It's rare to find someone getting it right.” — M. H. Abrams

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“We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.” — M. H. Abrams

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“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.” — M. H. Abrams

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“When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.” — M. H. Abrams

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“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.” — M. H. Abrams

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