226 Quotes by Harold Bloom

Hermetic angelology, studied by Corbin in his Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, posits a middle reality between sensory perceptions and divine revelations.

Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett’s canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett’s Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

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

There’s very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she’d been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn’t even good nonsense. It’s insufferable.

Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.

You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.

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

We’ll try this first. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. That’s life, isn’t it?

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.