Could we say that the short ...

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.
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 Irving Howe

Quotes from the same author

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