Irving Howe

Historian

1920-06-11

Quotes by Irving Howe

• The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

  Read quote

• The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

  Read quote

• Good readers make much out of little.

  Read quote

• Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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

  Read quote

• Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere.

  Read quote