"The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais,
is to augment one's own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a
better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind's dialogue with itself
is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of
one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality."
- Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages