I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough. Harold Bloom More Quotes by Harold Bloom More Quotes From 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 reading wise book There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes. Harold Bloom names Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order. Harold Bloom plato order ideas 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 hygiene what-matters color It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential. Harold Bloom capacity self exercise Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you. Harold Bloom pleasure solitude reading Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage. Harold Bloom multicultural stage language 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 self education reality To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all. Harold Bloom judgment ideology Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies. Harold Bloom three different art 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 lemmings political responsibility 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 literature doe thinking 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 counter-culture dark past 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 reading book children The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me. Harold Bloom writing class ideas Literature is achieved anxiety. Harold Bloom anxiety literature 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. Harold Bloom space sorrow people What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology. Harold Bloom philosophical school thinking I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say. Harold Bloom contamination might thinking 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 sadness reading kings
