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

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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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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
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The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.
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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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No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
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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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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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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.
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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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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 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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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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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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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 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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