241 Quotes by Terry Eagleton

Americans use the word ‘dream’ as often as psychoanalysts do.

A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately.

Macbeth as a whole is awash with questions, sometimes questions responded to by another question, which helps to generate an atmosphere of uncertainty, anxiety and paranoid suspicion.

But if we are not given his real name, then he does not have one.

Evil may be ‘unscientific’ but so is a song or a smile.

Characters may lend the action a certain colouring, but it is what happens that comes first. To overlook this while watching a tragedy would be like treating a football game simply as the acts of a set of solitary individuals, or as chance for each of them to display ‘personality’. The fact that some players behave as though this is precisely what football games are about should not distract us from this point.

Literary works quite often ‘know’ things that the reader does not know, or does not know yet, or perhaps will never know.

Morality has precious little to do with feeling in any case. The fact that you feel a surge of nausea at the sight of someone with half their head shot away is neither here nor there as long as you try to help them.

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.