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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.

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
Name
Names

More quotes by Harold Bloom

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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.
Harold Bloom
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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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Literature is achieved anxiety.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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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
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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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Shakespeare is universal.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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... 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
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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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There is no method except yourself.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
Harold Bloom
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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Harold Bloom
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The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
Harold Bloom
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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
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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.
Harold Bloom