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I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

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
Myth
Regard
Scene
Progress
Aggravation
Even
Regards
Believe
Myths
Decline
Literary

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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.
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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
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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 won't say he [Shakespeare] 'invented' us, because journalists perpetually misunderstand me on that. I'll put it more simply: he contains us. Our ways of thinking and feeling-about ourselves, those we love, those we hate, those we realize are hopelessly 'other' to us-are more shaped by Shakespeare than they are by the experience of our own lives.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
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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.
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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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There is no method except yourself.
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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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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
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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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I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
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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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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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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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