Quote

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

Harold Bloom

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Oxymoron
Therapy
Successful
Take

More quotes by Harold Bloom

Image
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Harold Bloom
Image
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Harold Bloom
Image
One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
Image
Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
Harold Bloom
Image
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
Image
Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.
Harold Bloom
Image
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.
Harold Bloom
Image
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Harold Bloom
Image
There is no method except yourself.
Harold Bloom
Image
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
Harold Bloom
Image
Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.
Harold Bloom
Image
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.
Harold Bloom
Image
Shakespeare is universal.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
Image
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.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
Image
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
Harold Bloom
Image
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.
Harold Bloom