226 Quotes by Harold Bloom

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism – which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people – is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.

Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.

You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen’s work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.

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

But Hamlet is death’s ambassador while Falstaff is the embassy of life.

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

Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness.