Quotes from Harold Bloom

What could Yeshua of Nazareth have made of Martin Luther's outburst Death to the Law! which in many German Lutherans who served Hitler became Death to the Jews! The Germans would not have crucified Jesus: they would have exterminated him at Auschwitz, their version of the Temple.

Denying Ahab greatness is an aesthetic blunder: He is akin to Achilles, Odysseus, and King David in one register, and to Don Quixote, Hamlet, and the High Romantic Prometheus of Goethe and Shelley in another. Call the first mode a transcendent heroism and the second the persistence of vision. Both ways are antithetical to nature and protest against our mortality. The epic hero will never submit or yield.

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

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.

All canonical writing possesses the quality of making you feel strangeness at home.

We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist.

All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, "condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves.

Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.

The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One

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.

I cannot locate any aestetic dignity in [Stephen] King's writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he...Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader.

To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory pipe dreams is right also.

Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.

Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for transport.

La escritura mala es toda igual; la buena escritura es de una diversidad escandalosa.

Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance.

A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.

Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.

One reads for oneself and for strangers.