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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.

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
History
Prior
Great
Text
Think
Testament
Thinking
Strongest
Greek
Entire
Influence
Successful
Misreading

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There is no method except yourself.
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Shakespeare is universal.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.
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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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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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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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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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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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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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... 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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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
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