Harold Bloom Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
-
“Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed,and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.”
-- Harold Bloom -
-
“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 -
“Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“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 -
-
“The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all,”
-- Harold BloomSource : Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
-
“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 -
-
“No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“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 -
“The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“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.”
-- Harold Bloom -
-
“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 -
“The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“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.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)”
-- Harold Bloom -
-
“I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike”
-- Harold BloomSource : "Criticism in Society". Interview with Imre Salusinski, 1987.
-
“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”
-- Harold BloomSource : "Falstaff for our times". www.theguardian.com. March 5, 1999.
-
“No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“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 BloomSource : Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
-
-
“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 BloomSource : Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
-
“Hamlet, Kiekegaard, 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 -
“The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.”
-- Harold Bloom -
-
“I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike - and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two - are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.”
-- Harold Bloom -
“It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.”
-- Harold BloomSource : Harold Bloom (2001). “Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages”, p.16, Simon and Schuster
You may also like:
-
Allan Bloom
Philosopher -
Camille Paglia
Teacher -
Cormac McCarthy
Novelist -
David Lehman
Poet -
Frank Kermode
Literary critic -
George Steiner
Literary critic -
Hart Crane
Poet -
Jacques Derrida
Philosopher -
James Joyce
Novelist -
John Ashbery
Poet -
Lionel Trilling
Literary critic -
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Novelist -
Northrop Frye
Literary critic -
Paul de Man
Philosopher -
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist -
Sigmund Freud
Neurologist -
T. S. Eliot
Playwright -
Wallace Stevens
Poet -
Walt Whitman
Poet -
William Shakespeare
Poet