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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
Pleasures
Precisely
Encourage
Universally
Morality
Practiced
Easier
Currently
Pleasure
Accessible
Everyone
Scholarship
Difficult
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I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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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.
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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
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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.
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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
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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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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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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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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
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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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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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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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