Terry Eagleton Quotes

If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.

Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment.

Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.

All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.

If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.

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

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

Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.

What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism.

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.