Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
42 quotes
"Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Originality must compound with inheritance."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"The inventor knows HOW to borrow."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden"
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"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."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes"
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"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."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket"
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages