Self-overhearing, in Shakespeare, is the royal road to change.

  

Samuel Johnson spoke of our “hunger of imagination” and conceded that Shakespeare alone assuaged that dangerous prevalence. Perhaps Shakespeare helped Johnson avoid madness, a function he has served for me whenever I waver in my own perilous balance.

,,,for Johnson, was a ceaseless activity that could not be allowed to idle.




Harold Bloom Quotes

@hbloomquotes


Literature doesn’t necessarily make you better, but it cannot make you worse, and surely it awakens you to the sufferings of the poor, the unprivileged.

We tend now to think of Kafka as the central post-Biblical Jewish writer, and his works were regarded as canonical by Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, yet he himself said he had nothing in common with Jews because he had nothing in common with himself.

The central poet of the American Religion is Walt Whitman, who dared to represent his own Resurrection and who hoped that Leaves of Grass would be the new Bible for Americans.