31 Quotes by M. H. Abrams

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.

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.

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

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.