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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
Space
Imperfect
Read
Overcome
Cannot
Vulnerable
Enough
Disappear
Familial
Time
Overcoming
Life
Likely
Sympathies
People
Sorrow
Sorrows
Friendship
Diminish

More quotes by Harold Bloom

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I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
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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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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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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Harold Bloom
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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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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Harold Bloom
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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.
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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
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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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The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
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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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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.
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom