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"41 Harold Bloom Quotes & Sayings

      American     /     View profile
Born: 11 July 1930. Died: 14 October 2019 | Critic | Author |

Real reading is a lonely activity.

Real Reading Lonely Activity
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Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

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

Read Hope Strange
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

Fail Prodigy
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We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
Read Frequently Quest Original
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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.

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

Hope Living
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I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

Naive Read Incessantly People
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Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
Nature Believe
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We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

Read Frequently Mind
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What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

Literature
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The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

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

Reading Pleasure Solitude You
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Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

Criticism Imagination Literature Soul
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We'll try this first. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. That's life, isn't it?

Something else Try Life
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I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

Think History I
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I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

Love Literature I
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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Critics Cry Finest Full
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Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

Consciousness
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At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Bad Bad Moments Literary
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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.

Life Critic
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The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves...The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.

Art Poetry Consciousness
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All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.

Like Life
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Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Fail Try Try Again
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He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.

Think Write Talent
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I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

Believe Believed Critic Criticism
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But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

Alone Being Consider Days
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Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

Adolescence Come Criticism Even
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I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

Believe Decline Even Literary
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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

Future Literary No Future Say
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If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.

Abandon Academy Alleviate Classes
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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.

About Any Art Beyond
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No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
Crucial Enough Even Ever
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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.

Author Everyone Everywhere Exists
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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

Fails One Sometimes Succeeds
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The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

Better Does Get Gets
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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.

Better Current Does Either
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What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

Any Call Exclude Mostly
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All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.
Ceases Critic Deadly Encouragement
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Harold Bloom Quotes & Sayings