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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

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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
Beyond
Ways
Getting
Prophecies
Individual
Hegel
Death
Freud
Art
Marx
Three
Prophecy
Different
Indeed

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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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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.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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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.
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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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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.
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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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I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
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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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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
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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.
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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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The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
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There is no method except yourself.
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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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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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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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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