Terry Eagleton Quotes

I can see now that a concept or even a feeling makes no sense unless out of our substance we spin around it a web of references, of relationships, of values.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.

Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.

We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.

If you want to interpret well and confidently, set Christ before you, for He is the man to whom it all applies, every bit of it.

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind , and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections:;; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.

To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

The question is not what you look at – but how you look & whether you see.

Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.

I think sometimes you don't understand how to convey an idea, depending on the moment you're living in.

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.