Terry Eagleton Quotes

Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

It's disquieting to reflect that one's dreams never symbolize one's real wishes, but always something Much Worse... If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of dentists or gardening. I wonder what unspeakable depths of awfulness can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter's embraces?

You can compare it to dreams: you have a very specific and individual pictorial language that you either accept or that you can translate rashly and wrongly. Of course, you can ignore dreams, but that would be a shame, because they're useful.

I have always said to my pupils: "Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it when you are analyzing a dream."

The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

It’s strange how dreams get under your skin and give your heart a test for what’s real and what’s imaginary.

I'm sure I have a process, but it mostly takes place in my dreams.

Dreams are a scientific fact.

I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it.

The usual comment from psychologists and psychiatrists was that it's best not to encourage people to look at their dreams because they are liable to stir up problems for themselves.

I'm somebody who gets a lot of inspiration from dreams.

My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I'm fascinated by Jung, by dream work.

I'm drawn to dreams.

I'm one of those people who keep a dream journal.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Psychoanalysis: a rabbit that was swallowed by a boa constrictor just wanted to see what it was like in there.

I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras seem commonplace.

Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.

I have a reoccurring dream that I'm in the ocean in New Zealand and everything is completely upside down, because it's on the other side of the planet.

No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream.

Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth.

One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.

In a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols, and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another.