Irving Howe famous quotes

03-26-2025

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.
-- Irving Howe

#Reality #Imagination #Leaving
Language rarely lies. It can reveal the insincerity of a writer's claims simply through a grating adjective or an inflated phrase. We come upon a frenzy of words and suspect it hides a paucity of feeling.
-- Irving Howe

#Lying #Feelings #Adjectives
Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.
-- Irving Howe

#Writing #Suggestions #Anecdotes
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 does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short.
-- Irving Howe

#Writing #Unity #Doe
Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere.
-- Irving Howe

#Atmosphere #Curls #Phrases
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 equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society
-- Irving Howe

#Self #Space #Mind
The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.
-- Irving Howe

#Philosophy #Looks #Literature
Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.
-- Irving Howe

#Civilization #Farce #Bears
Good readers make much out of little.
-- Irving Howe

#Book #Reading #Littles
The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.
-- Irving Howe

#Unattainable #Innocence #Cherish
The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.
-- Irving Howe

#Reading #Complaints
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 of those whose lives it wishes to improve.
-- Irving Howe

#Passion #Wish #Flaws
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 roses. Pink roses. Suddenly I felt the most powerful feeling of peace, and I had the thought that death, if it means an absorption into a reality like the one that was before me, might be all right.
-- Irving Howe

#Powerful #Mean #Reality

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