Top 100 Harold Bloom Quotes
#2. Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.
Andrew O'Hagan
#3. Love is a crowded theater, for as Harold Bloom remarks, We can never embrace (sexually or otherwise) a single person, but embrace the whole of her or his family romance.
Camille Paglia
#4. John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
M.H. Abrams
#5. Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.
Harold Bloom
#6. 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
#7. I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
Harold Bloom
#8. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
#9. 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
#10. All canonical writing possesses the quality of making you feel strangeness at home.
Harold Bloom
#11. 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
#12. Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Harold Bloom
#13. Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.
Harold Bloom
#14. Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.
Harold Bloom
#15. It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.
Harold Bloom
#16. The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.
Harold Bloom
#17. Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Harold Bloom
#18. No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
Harold Bloom
#19. Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.
Harold Bloom
#20. 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
#21. Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.
Harold Bloom
#22. It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.
Harold Bloom
#24. What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.
Harold Bloom
#25. Forgetfulness is a property of all action. The man of action is also without knowledge: he forgets most things in order to do one, he is unjust to what is behind him, and only recognizes one law - the law of that which is to be.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#26. 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
#27. We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
Harold Bloom
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport".
Harold Bloom
#31. Oscar Wilde's "beautiful untrue things" that save the imagination from falling into "careless habits of accuracy.
Harold Bloom
#32. To condemn Wordsworth for not writing verse of political and social protest, or for having forsaken the revolution, is to cross the final divide between academic arrogance and moral smugness.
Harold Bloom
#33. [Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well.
Harold Bloom
#34. Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.
Harold Bloom
#35. We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.
Harold Bloom
#36. You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.
Harold Bloom
#38. Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.
Harold Bloom
#39. The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.
Harold Bloom
#40. (Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.
Harold Bloom
#41. At eighty-four, I can only write the way I go on teaching, personally and passionately.
Harold Bloom
#42. My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.
Harold Bloom
#43. What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
Harold Bloom
#44. 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
#45. I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity
Harold Bloom
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.
Harold Bloom
#49. The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.
Harold Bloom
#50. Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.
Harold Bloom
#51. Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance.
Harold Bloom
#52. There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
Harold Bloom
#53. Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.
Harold Bloom
#54. If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.
Harold Bloom
#55. In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
Harold Bloom
#56. How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.
Harold Bloom
#57. Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.
Harold Bloom
#58. Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
Harold Bloom
#59. Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.
Harold Bloom
#60. 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
#61. At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
Harold Bloom
#63. The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.
Harold Bloom
#64. 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
#65. Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading ... the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.
Harold Bloom
#67. 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
#68. One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.
Harold Bloom
#69. A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics[.]
Harold Bloom
#70. 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
#71. We'll try this first. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. That's life, isn't it?
Harold Bloom
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Hermetic angelology, studied by Corbin in his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, posits a middle reality between sensory perceptions and divine revelations.
Harold Bloom
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.
Harold Bloom
#79. Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.
Harold Bloom
#80. I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
Harold Bloom
#81. Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.
Harold Bloom
#82. Until you become yourself," Bloom avers, "what benefit can you be to others.
Harold Bloom
#83. One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength.
Harold Bloom
#84. 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
#85. Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.
Harold Bloom
#86. 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
#87. The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
Harold Bloom
#88. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?
Harold Bloom
#89. Frye's influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence.
Harold Bloom
#90. The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
Harold Bloom
#91. I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.
Harold Bloom
#92. What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.
Harold Bloom
#93. Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.
Harold Bloom
#94. The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.
Harold Bloom
#95. Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.
Harold Bloom
#96. No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Harold Bloom
#97. What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.
Harold Bloom
#98. Thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt be any more.
Harold Bloom
#99. The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.
Harold Bloom
#100. There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.
Harold Bloom
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