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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Tracing
Beads
Counting
Text
Constant
Reading
Necklace
Process
Flickering
Like
Necklaces

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

Image
Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
Terry Eagleton
Image
The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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
Image
In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
Terry Eagleton
Image
God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Christian faith, as I understand it, is not primarily a matter of signing on for the proposition that there exists a Supreme Being, but the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.
Terry Eagleton
Image
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
Image
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.
Terry Eagleton
Image
It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Terry Eagleton
Image
Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.
Terry Eagleton