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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.

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
Literature
Language
Speak
Swarming
Plurality
Speaks
Author

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

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It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it.
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Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
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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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You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
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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.
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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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Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.
Terry Eagleton
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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.
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
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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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What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
Terry Eagleton
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Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
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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For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
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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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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Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.
Terry Eagleton
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The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
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