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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

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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
Sympathy
Admit
University
Stalinism
Totally
Stalin
Criticism
Universities
Goes
Phase
Without
Entered
Phases

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I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
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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.
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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.
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No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
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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.
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I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
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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.
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... 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.
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The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
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I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
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What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
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There is no method except yourself.
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I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
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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.
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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
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
Harold Bloom