Skip to content

Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

— Terry Eagleton Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

Another quote →

More quotes by Terry Eagleton

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Why Marx Was Right (2011)

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

Why Marx Was Right (2011)

There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

Why Marx Was Right (2011)

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

Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

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

Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

All Terry Eagleton quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Terry Eagleton (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.