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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

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
Ordinary
Deviates
Literature
Intensifies
Language
Deviate
Systematically
Quietness
Transforms
Everyday
Speech

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Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.
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God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.
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Nothing in human life is inherently private.
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The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.
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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.
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To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.
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Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
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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.
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It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
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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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It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
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Americans use the word dream as often as psychoanalysts do.
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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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History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
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Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
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