226 Quotes by Harold Bloom

Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.

Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.

Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.

Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.

Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport".