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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.

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
Gives
Freud
Ways
Supposedly
Fact
Vocabulary
Facts
Translate
Giving
Maps
Freudian
Mind
Shakespeare
Translating
Way
Finds
Invents
Psychology
Analytical

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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
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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 realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
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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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I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
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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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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.
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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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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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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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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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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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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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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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Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
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Shakespeare is universal.
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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.
Harold Bloom