(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.

— Harold Bloom

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.

— Harold Bloom

Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.

— Harold Bloom

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

— Harold Bloom

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

— Harold Bloom

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

— Harold Bloom

What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.

— Harold Bloom

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

— Harold Bloom

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

You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.

— Harold Bloom