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

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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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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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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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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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We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
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Shakespeare is universal.
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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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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
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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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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
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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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I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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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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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 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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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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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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