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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
Progress
Aggravation
Even
Regards
Believe
Myths
Decline
Literary
Myth
Regard
Scene

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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.
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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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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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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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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
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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.
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There is no method except yourself.
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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 am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
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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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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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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
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We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
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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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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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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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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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