226 Quotes by Harold Bloom

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

The central image for freedom in Lucretius is the clinamen or sudden “swerve.” As the atoms in the cosmos fall downward and outward they capriciously swerve, and this change in direction provides for our freedom of will. Last poems, as I read them, execute clinamens in regard to a previous poetic career. They assert a final freedom for the imagination.

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.

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

Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.

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.

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

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.

I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s King Lear, or Tolstoy’s novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity.