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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
Origin
Wanting
Beyond
Difficult
Back
Without
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

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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
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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.
Terry Eagleton
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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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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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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
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Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
Terry Eagleton
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
Terry Eagleton
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I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.
Terry Eagleton
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It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
Terry Eagleton
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All communication involves faith indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
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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Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.
Terry Eagleton
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Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
Terry Eagleton
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
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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Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
Terry Eagleton
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Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
Terry Eagleton
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We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.
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