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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

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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
Morality
Practiced
Easier
Currently
Pleasure
Accessible
Everyone
Scholarship
Difficult
Replace
Pleasures
Precisely
Encourage
Universally

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I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
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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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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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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 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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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.
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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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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
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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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Shakespeare is universal.
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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
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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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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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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
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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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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.
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