226 Quotes by Harold Bloom

The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

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.

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.