Irving Howe Quotes

11 quotes in 222 categories

• I was in a garden at the Rodin Museum. For a few minutes I was alone, sitting on a bench between two long hedges of…
• Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.
• One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience…
• The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.
• The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.
• Good readers make much out of little.
• Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.
• The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.
• No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions…
• Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere.
• Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric…

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