Collectivity Quote by Harold Bloom

“... one doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.”

Harold Bloom

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Collectivity Death Inspirational Knows Mediocrity Nature Time Want

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I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike - and I don't think there really is a distinction between the…

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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

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“Brecht was a cynical bohemian bogey of the middle classes, but also much more than a mere provocateur. He developed and dramatized his political…

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The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.

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Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements…

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

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

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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

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The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

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If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there…

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Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises…

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Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we…

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How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had…

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The people themselves are not a homogeneous cultural collectivity but present numerous and variously combined cultural stratifications which, in their pure form, cannot always…

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