01UndatedLiterary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strongest - Johnson, Hazlitt, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Paul Valéer, among others - it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
02UndatedWe are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
06UndatedPragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
07UndatedAesthetic 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 / quote ↗
08UndatedAesthetic 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.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
09UndatedCharacters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
11UndatedReading well is one of the great pleasuresthat solitude can afford you, because it isat least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
13UndatedA poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortalityHarold Bloom / quote ↗
16UndatedI could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
18UndatedWhen critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, "one that expects no liberation from liberation.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
19UndatedThe 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.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
20UndatedAll canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
22UndatedIt has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
24UndatedTerror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport".Harold Bloom / quote ↗
