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Harold Bloom Quotes

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Famous Harold Bloom Quotes

“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.”

OptimismOpennessLiberalityFreedom Of Spirit
Book:The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
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“Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.”

PoetryReadingOscar WildeCanon
Book:The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
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“Shakespeare will not allow Falstaff to die upon stage. We see and hear the deaths of Hamlet, Cleopatra, Antony, Othello, and Lear. Iago is led away to die silently under torture. Macbeth dies offstage but he goes down fighting. Falstaff dies singing the Twenty-third Psalm, smiling upon his fingertips, playing with flowers, and crying aloud to God three or four times. That sounds more like pain than prayer. We do not want Sir John Falstaff to die. And of course he does not. He is life itself.”

LifeShakespeareFalstaff
Book:Falstaff: Give Me Life
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