Harold Bloom
Critic
1930-07-11
Quotes by Harold Bloom
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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.
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Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden
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One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.
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To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. 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.
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Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.
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The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.
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Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes
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King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.
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Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.
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Originality must compound with inheritance.
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Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.
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The inventor knows HOW to borrow.
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The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.
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We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
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Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.
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Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.
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One reads for oneself and for strangers.
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There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
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(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.
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