Harold Bloom Quotes

Quotes about:

• Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

  Harold Bloom

  Mediocrity, Want, Failing

  49 Copy quote

• Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?

  Harold Bloom

  Information, Found, Available

  "Why read this?" by Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. August 18, 2000.

  6 Copy quote

• The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

  Harold Bloom

  Education, Reality, Self

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  17 Copy quote

• People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

  Harold Bloom

  Reading, Writing, People

  "Falstaff for our times". www.theguardian.com. March 5, 1999.

  23 Copy quote

• We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

  Harold Bloom

  Mind, Originals, Ifs

  21 Copy quote

• We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.

  Harold Bloom

  Reading, Knowledge, Self

  Harold Bloom (2001). “How to Read and Why”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

  11 Copy quote

• The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

  Harold Bloom

  Beautiful, Paragraph, Prose

  24 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Writing, Share

  Harold Bloom (2001). “How to Read and Why”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

  14 Copy quote

• The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

  Harold Bloom

  Doe, World

  "Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1". Interview with Antonio Weiss, biblioklept.org. 1991.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Finals, May, Accepting

  "The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages". Book by Harold Bloom, 1994.

  17 Copy quote

• To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.

  Harold Bloom

  Judgment, Ideology

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

• Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

  Harold Bloom

  Reading, Solitude, Pleasure

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Sympathy, Criticism, Goes On

  8 Copy quote

• I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

  Harold Bloom

  World, Knaves, Charlatans

  "Criticism in Society". Interview with Imre Salusinski, 1987.

  21 Copy quote

• I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

  Harold Bloom

  Kings, Reading, Sadness

  7 Copy quote

• It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

  Harold Bloom

  Goes On, Extraordinary, Hard

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  What Matters, Color, Hygiene

  8 Copy quote

• We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

  Harold Bloom

  Past, Journey, Three

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Harold Bloom

  Loneliness, Fire, Light

  Harold Bloom (2011). “The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life”, p.10, Yale University Press

  4 Copy quote

• Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

  Harold Bloom

  Pain, Memories, Struggle

  9 Copy quote

• We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.

  Harold Bloom

  Harold Bloom (2001). “How to Read and Why”, p.79, Simon and Schuster

  7 Copy quote

• It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.

  Harold Bloom

  Exercise, Self, Capacity

  Harold Bloom (2001). “Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

  Harold Bloom

  Potters, Stones, Ends

  12 Copy quote

• If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

  Harold Bloom

  Believe, Order, Political

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

• ...the Bible itself is less read than preached, less interpreted than brandished. Increasingly, pastors may drape a limply bound Book over the edges of the pulpit as they depart from it. Members of the congregation carry Bibles to church services; the paster announces a long passage text for his sermon and waits for people to find it, then reads only the first verse of it before he takes off. The Book has become a talisman.

  Harold Bloom

  Book, Past, Church Service

  12 Copy quote

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