Quote

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

Terry Eagleton

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Terry Eagleton
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: February 22
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Theorist
Non-Fiction Writer
Researcher
University Teacher
Writer
Salford
Greater Manchester
Art
Subtle
Milton
Around
Arts
Ingenious
Years
Students
Duck
Poetry
Ducks
Arms
Jane
Grow
Avoiding
Gratefully
Grows
Collapse
Blake
Year
Literary
Austen

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Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
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The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.
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Negativity is often looked upon [in the USA] as a kind of thought crime. Not since the advent of socialist realism has the world witnessed such pathological upbeatness.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
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What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
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The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.
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Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
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Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.
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Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
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A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
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Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
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There is an insuperable problem about introducing immigrants to British values. There are no British values. Nor are there any Serbian or Peruvian values. No nation has a monopoly on fairness and decency, justice and humanity.
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To declare in St John's words that Jesus and the Father are one is to claim that Jesus's dependence on the Other is not self-estrangement but self-ful lment. At the core of his identity ..lies nothing but unconditional love.
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