Quote

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

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
Humans
Critics
Book
Matters
Matter
Cry
Full
Reading
Read
Tell
Hears
Human
Finest

More quotes by Harold Bloom

Image
Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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 am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
Harold Bloom
Image
I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
Harold Bloom
Image
There is no method except yourself.
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
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
Image
Shakespeare is universal.
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
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
Harold Bloom
Image
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
Image
A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.
Harold Bloom
Image
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
Image
The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
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
I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
Harold Bloom
Image
Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
Harold Bloom
Image
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
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