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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.

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
Back
Without
Think
Thinking
Origin
Wanting
Beyond
Difficult

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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 British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.
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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
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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.
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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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Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
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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.
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Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
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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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Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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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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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
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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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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Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
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Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.
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