The Bright Book of Life Quotes

“Dr. Samuel Johnson, who admired the novel with absolute conviction, famously remarked to Boswell, “Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story…you would hang yourself….You must read him for the sentiment.”
― Harold Bloom, The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

“These days readers shun difficulty, because they are so desperately distracted. The Age of the Screen jeopardizes the art of the novel.”
― Harold Bloom, The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

“I regard Clarissa and In Search of Lost Time as the two most eminent of all novels, surpassing even Tolstoy and Dickens.”
― Harold Bloom, The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

“The subtlest element in this subtlest of novels is the call upon the reader’s own power of memory to match the persistence and intensity of the yearning that Anne Elliot is too stoical to express directly.”
― Harold Bloom, The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

“If the highest art after all catches us unaware, even as we and Pierre together learn the secret and meaning of his life in this central moment, then no novelistic art, not even that of Proust, can surpass Tolstoy’s.
“Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.”
― Harold Bloom, The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

“Clarissa Harlowe is a larger form than all the heroines of the Protestant will descended from her: Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot; Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne; George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke; Thomas Hardy’s Sue Bridehead; Henry James’s Isabel Archer, Milly Theale; D. H. Lawrence’s Ursula Brangwen; E. M. Forster’s Margaret Schlegel; and Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe.”
― Harold Bloom, The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread