Quotes from Irving Howe

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

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

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

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

There is utopia and utopia. The kind imposed by an elite in the name of a historical imperative—that utopia is hell. It must lead to terror and then, terror exhausted, to cynicism and torpor. But surely there is another utopia. It cannot be willed either into existence or out of sight, it speaks for our sense of what may yet be.

Modernity consists in a revolt against the prevailing style, an unyielding rage against the official order.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

There can't be much development of action or theme in such stories, but at least there is some. By contrast, in the short short the very idea of character seems to lose its significance, seems in fact to drop out of sight. We see human figures in a momentary flash. We see them in fleeting profile. We see them in archetypal climaxes which define their mode of existence. Situation tends to replace character, representative condition to replace individuality. ("Introduction")

Society now hovers over mankind like a crushing weight, sometimes it seems with a willful malevolence.

Scholarship was, above all else, honored among the Jews—scholarship not as "pure" activity, not as intellectual release, but as the pathway, sometimes treacherous

The world, or at least a few decent portions of it, could still be moved by the sight of thousands of victims, perhaps because it had not yet become hardened to the sight of millions.