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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
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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
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Read
Learn
Contradict
Nature
Reads
Writing
Writes
Believe
Deeply
Accept
Accepting
More quotes by Harold Bloom
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Harold Bloom
I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
Harold Bloom
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
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
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.
Harold Bloom
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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
... 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
The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
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
There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
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
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
Literature is achieved anxiety.
Harold Bloom
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
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
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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
No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Harold Bloom
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
