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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.
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
Friendship
Diminish
Space
Imperfect
Read
Overcome
Cannot
Vulnerable
Enough
Disappear
Time
Overcoming
Familial
Life
Likely
Sympathies
People
Sorrow
Sorrows
More quotes by Harold Bloom
You know, I don't want to be offensive. But 'Infinite Jest' [regarded by many as Wallace's masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.
Harold Bloom
The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
Harold Bloom
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
Harold Bloom
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.
Harold Bloom
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
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Harold Bloom
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
Harold Bloom
Literature is achieved anxiety.
Harold Bloom
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Harold Bloom
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Harold Bloom
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
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Harold Bloom
Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
Harold Bloom
What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
Harold Bloom
I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
Harold Bloom
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.
Harold Bloom
... one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.
Harold Bloom
Shakespeare is universal.
Harold Bloom
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
