“ 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 Whi… Harold Bloom
“ Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a b… Harold Bloom
“ It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory. Harold Bloom
“ Reading well is one of the great pleasuresthat solitude can afford you, because it isat least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. Harold Bloom
“ Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes Harold Bloom
“ 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
“ Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry. Harold Bloom
“ 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) ou… Harold Bloom
“ I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. Harold Bloom
“ 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… Harold Bloom
