Top 160 Harold Bloom Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.”

— Harold Bloom

102. “To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.”

— Harold Bloom

103. “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

104. “It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.”

— Harold Bloom

105. “For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.”

— Harold Bloom

106. “Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.”

— Harold Bloom

107. “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.”

— Harold Bloom

108. “Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.”

— Harold Bloom

109. “What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.”

— Harold Bloom

110. “Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”

— Harold Bloom

111. “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.”

— Harold Bloom

112. “Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes.”

— Harold Bloom

113. “Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.”

— Harold Bloom

114. “Criticism starts – it has to start – with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.”

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

116. “Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden.”

— Harold Bloom

117. “When 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

118. “Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.”

— Harold Bloom

119. “The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.”

— Harold Bloom

120. “The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.”

— Harold Bloom

121. “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

122. “I am your true Marxist critic, following Groucho rather than Karl, and take as my motto Groucho’s grand admonition: “Whatever it is, I’m against it!”

— Harold Bloom

123. “Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.”

— Harold Bloom

124. “The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them.”

— Harold Bloom

125. “King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.”

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

127. “Frye’s influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, “The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence.”

— Harold Bloom

128. “Characters carrying the playwright’s disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.”

— Harold Bloom

129. “Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.”

— Harold Bloom

130. “I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.”

— Harold Bloom

131. “At eighty-four, I can only write the way I go on teaching, personally and passionately.”

— Harold Bloom

132. “One reads for oneself and for strangers.”

— Harold Bloom

133. “Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.”

— Harold Bloom

134. “The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.”

— Harold Bloom

135. “If your quest is for a truth that defies rhetoric, perhaps you ought to study political economy or systems analysis and abandon Shakespeare to the aesthetes and the groundlings, who combined to elevate him in the first place.”

— Harold Bloom

136. “All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.”

— Harold Bloom

137. “Originality must compound with inheritance.”

— Harold Bloom

138. “Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness.”

— Harold Bloom

139. “I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards to the literary scene. The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent. The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature.”

— Harold Bloom

140. “American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ’s love for each of them.”

— Harold Bloom

141. “I regard Clarissa and In Search of Lost Time as the two most eminent of all novels, surpassing even Tolstoy and Dickens.”

— Harold Bloom

142. “It 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

143. “A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity’s disorders, including the fear of mortality.”

— Harold Bloom

144. “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

145. “For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”

— Harold Bloom

146. “The inventor knows HOW to borrow.”

— Harold Bloom

147. “The vision men call Lilith is formed primarily by their anxiety at what they perceive to be the beauty of a woman’s body, a beauty they believe to be at once, far greater and far less than their own.”

— Harold Bloom

148. “Without the Canon, we cease to think.”

— Harold Bloom

149. “What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.”

— Harold Bloom

150. “Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket.”

— Harold Bloom