Harold Bloom Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

• 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

  Reading, Writing, People

  "Falstaff for our times". www.theguardian.com. March 5, 1999.

• 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

  Past, Journey, Three

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Literature is achieved anxiety.

  Harold Bloom

  Anxiety, Literature

• 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.

  Harold Bloom

  Thinking, Doe, Literature

  "Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1". Interview with Antonio Weiss. Issue 118, www.theparisreview.org. Spring 1991.

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

  Harold Bloom

  What Matters, Color, Hygiene

• The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . 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, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

  Harold Bloom

  Education, Reality, Self

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.

  Harold Bloom

  Arbitrary, Literature, Determined

• We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran.

  Harold Bloom

  Jesus, Believe, Character

• 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.

  Harold Bloom

  Believe, Criticism, Doe

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