Harold Bloom Professions : Literary critic Born : July 11, 1930 Browse All Authors Top 84 quotes by Harold Bloom Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable. Harold Bloom mediocrity failing want The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American. Harold Bloom paragraph prose beautiful 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 I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike Harold Bloom charlatans knaves world We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own. Harold Bloom originals ifs mind It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary. Harold Bloom extraordinary hard goes-on 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 share writing believe 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 accepting may 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 odessa cities moving 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 self knowledge The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers. Harold Bloom passion reading art 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 three journey past 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 ends stones ...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 church-service book past 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 views writing thinking 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 struggle memories We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find. Harold Bloom The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent. Harold Bloom doe world Real reading is a lonely activity. Harold Bloom lonely real reading 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 want writing thinking Similar Authors Bliss Perry literary-critic Irving Howe literary-critic Diana Trilling literary-critic Daphne Merkin literary-critic Henry Louis Gates literary-critic Christopher Ricks literary-critic All Authors
