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
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. – Harold Bloom
But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean Im told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society… but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude. – Harold Bloom
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. – Harold Bloom
Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it. But when we pick ourselves up we find our bones are, after all, not broken; while level enough and not unpleasing is the new terrace which lies unexplored before us. – Logan Pearsall Smith, “Age and Death,” Afterthoughts, 1931