Quotes by M. Abrams

• John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
• 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.
• When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
• 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.
• We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.
• The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.
• Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.
• If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
• If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
• Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.
• The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.
• It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.