Harold Bloom Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Harold Bloom.
Famous Quotes By Harold Bloom
We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become. — Harold Bloom
Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness. — Harold Bloom
I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene. — Harold Bloom
A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality — Harold Bloom
Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue. — Harold Bloom
Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds. — Harold Bloom
We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life. — Harold Bloom
Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy. — Harold Bloom
It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory. — Harold Bloom
The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective. — Harold Bloom
Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self. — Harold Bloom
To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is right also. — Harold Bloom
Shakespeare is universal. — Harold Bloom
Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment. — Harold Bloom
I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence. — Harold Bloom
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find. — Harold Bloom
Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it. — Harold Bloom
Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands. — Harold Bloom
seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall. — Harold Bloom
Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves ... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change. — Harold Bloom
All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, "condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves. — Harold Bloom
Thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt be any more. — Harold Bloom
All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life. — Harold Bloom
It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary. — Harold Bloom
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read. — Harold Bloom
What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition. — Harold Bloom
The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic. — Harold Bloom
Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention. — Harold Bloom
A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa ... Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both. — Harold Bloom
I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. — Harold Bloom
I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works. — Harold Bloom
We'll try this first. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. That's life, isn't it? — Harold Bloom
Oscar Wilde's "beautiful untrue things" that save the imagination from falling into "careless habits of accuracy. — Harold Bloom
BLOOM: I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
INTERVIEWER: It's always interminable?
BLOOM: I do not know anyone who has ever benefited from Freudian or any other mode of analysis, except by being, to use the popular trope for it, so badly shrunk, that they become quite dried out. That is to say, all passion spent. Perhaps they become better people, but they also become stale and uninteresting people with very few exceptions. Like dried-out cheese, or wilted flowers. — Harold Bloom
Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty. — Harold Bloom
Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion. — Harold Bloom
Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left. — Harold Bloom
No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean. — Harold Bloom
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist. — Harold Bloom
I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments. — Harold Bloom
People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. — Harold Bloom
The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters. — Harold Bloom
Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence. — Harold Bloom
The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality. W — Harold Bloom
American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ's love for each of them. — Harold Bloom
BLOOM: As far as I'm concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they're called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it.
INTERVIEWER: And someone else edits?
BLOOM: No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited. — Harold Bloom
As an addict who will read anything, I obeyed, but I am not saved, and return to tell you neither what to read nor how to read it, only what I have read and think worthy of rereading, which may be the only pragmatic test for the canonical. — Harold Bloom
The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written. — Harold Bloom
Until you become yourself," Bloom avers, "what benefit can you be to others. — Harold Bloom
All canonical writing possesses the quality of making you feel strangeness at home. — Harold Bloom
We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading ... is the search for a difficult pleasure. — Harold Bloom
The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves ... The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes. — Harold Bloom
I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own. — Harold Bloom
Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired. — Harold Bloom
The unity of a great era is generally an illusion. — Harold Bloom
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem. — Harold Bloom
You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love. — Harold Bloom
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads. — Harold Bloom
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude. — Harold Bloom
The inventor knows HOW to borrow. — Harold Bloom
King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life. — Harold Bloom
There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare. — Harold Bloom
All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is. — Harold Bloom
You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock. — Harold Bloom
Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder. — Harold Bloom
Denying Ahab greatness is an aesthetic blunder: He is akin to Achilles, Odysseus, and King David in one register, and to Don Quixote, Hamlet, and the High Romantic Prometheus of Goethe and Shelley in another. Call the first mode a transcendent heroism and the second the persistence of vision. Both ways are antithetical to nature and protest against our mortality. The epic hero will never submit or yield. — Harold Bloom
Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate. — Harold Bloom
Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes — Harold Bloom
Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails. — Harold Bloom
Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one. — Harold Bloom
The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy. — Harold Bloom
To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude. — Harold Bloom
Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies. — Harold Bloom
Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge. — Harold Bloom
We are great fools. "He has spent his life in idleness," we say; "I have done nothing today." What, have you not lived? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. . . . To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. — Harold Bloom
Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin. — Harold Bloom
The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William. — Harold Bloom
Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value. — Harold Bloom
The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks. — Harold Bloom
Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence) — Harold Bloom
What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed,and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing. — Harold Bloom
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? — Harold Bloom
We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran. — Harold Bloom
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. — Harold Bloom
I cannot locate any aestetic dignity in [Stephen] King's writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he ... Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader. — Harold Bloom
But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society ... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude. — Harold Bloom
Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well. — Harold Bloom
We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own. — Harold Bloom
Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work. — Harold Bloom
Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks. — Harold Bloom