31 Quotes by M. H. Abrams

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.

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

At first, students tend to freeze at the first effort. The breakthrough comes when they realize that they can make it better - can identify what their purposes were and realize better ways to achieve those purposes.

I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It's not the final thing, it's the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite.

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

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury.

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.

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