01Undated(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
02UndatedEveryone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
03Undated(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
04UndatedThere'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.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
05UndatedSamuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
07UndatedYou can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
08UndatedReading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
09UndatedWe read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
11UndatedThe aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
16UndatedHow 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 / quote ↗
17UndatedThe 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.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
18UndatedShakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
19UndatedOne 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.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
21UndatedTo 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.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
22UndatedGreat literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causesHarold Bloom / quote ↗
23UndatedGreat writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
24UndatedAll writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
