Quote

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

Harold Bloom

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Harold Bloom
Age: 89 †
Born: 1930
Born: July 11
Died: 2019
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Professor
Writer
New York City
New York
Harold Irving Bloom
Wants
Everyone
Makes
Prodigy
Prodigies
Bearable
Mediocrity
Fail
Failing

More quotes by Harold Bloom

Image
You know, I don't want to be offensive. But 'Infinite Jest' [regarded by many as Wallace's masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
Image
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
Image
Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
Harold Bloom
Image
... one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.
Harold Bloom
Image
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
Image
The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Harold Bloom
Image
I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Harold Bloom
Image
Hamlet, Kierkegaard, 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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Shakespeare is universal.
Harold Bloom
Image
Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.
Harold Bloom