Quote

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

Harold Bloom

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Posts
Shakespearean
Managed
Post

More quotes by Harold Bloom

Image
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
Image
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.
Harold Bloom
Image
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.
Harold Bloom
Image
There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
Harold Bloom
Image
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.
Harold Bloom
Image
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.
Harold Bloom
Image
Shakespeare is universal.
Harold Bloom
Image
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Harold Bloom
Image
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
Harold Bloom
Image
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.
Harold Bloom
Image
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.
Harold Bloom
Image
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
Harold Bloom
Image
... 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
Image
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
Harold Bloom