Top 160 Harold Bloom Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.”

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Harold Bloom

107. “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

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

— Harold Bloom

109. “Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.”

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

115. “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

116. “Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.”

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

120. “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

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

123. “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

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Harold Bloom

134. “Originality must compound with inheritance.”

— Harold Bloom

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Harold Bloom

139. “The inventor knows HOW to borrow.”

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— 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. “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

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

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

147. “The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.”

— Harold Bloom

148. “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

149. “The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.”

— Harold Bloom

150. “The pre-Socratic aphorism – ethos is the daemon – can be translated as “character is fate.” In drama, character is action. Shakespeare, too capacious for any formula, leads me to a rival aphorism: Pathos also is the daemon, which could be rendered as “personality is our destiny.” In Shakespearean theatricalism, personality is suffering. Action, Wordsworth wrote, is momentary, while suffering is permanent, obscure, dark, and shares the nature of infinity.”

— Harold Bloom