Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.

— Harold Bloom

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.

— Harold Bloom

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

— Harold Bloom

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

— Harold Bloom

Since ideology, particularly in its shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.

— Harold Bloom

Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport".

— Harold Bloom

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

— Harold Bloom

The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.

— Harold Bloom

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

— Harold Bloom

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

— Harold Bloom