Quote

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.

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
Text
Constant
Reading
Necklace
Process
Flickering
Like
Necklaces
Tracing
Beads
Counting

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

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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.
Terry Eagleton
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Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
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For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
Terry Eagleton
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From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
Terry Eagleton
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There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
Terry Eagleton
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Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.
Terry Eagleton
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One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
Terry Eagleton
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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
Terry Eagleton
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I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.
Terry Eagleton
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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
Terry Eagleton
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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
Terry Eagleton
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It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
Terry Eagleton
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In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
Terry Eagleton
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Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world
Terry Eagleton
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Nothing in human life is inherently private.
Terry Eagleton
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It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
Terry Eagleton
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The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.
Terry Eagleton