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 More Quotes by Harold Bloom More Quotes From Harold Bloom Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable. Harold Bloom mediocrityfailingwant The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American. Harold Bloom paragraphprosebeautiful 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 readingwritingpeople I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike Harold Bloom charlatansknavesworld We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own. Harold Bloom originalsifsmind It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary. Harold Bloom extraordinaryhardgoes-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 sharewritingbelieve 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 finalsacceptingmay 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 odessacitiesmoving 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 readingselfknowledge The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers. Harold Bloom passionreadingart 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 threejourneypast 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 pottersendsstones ...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-servicebookpast 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 viewswritingthinking 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 painstrugglememories 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 doeworld Real reading is a lonely activity. Harold Bloom lonelyrealreading 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 wantwritingthinking
