Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all. . Terry Eagleton
About This Quote

It is we who are made of dreams. We are not just Ariel and Caliban, the characters who have taken shape in the air of the mind. We are also the people who live this life, full of sights, sounds, and pleasures. We are not just the things that are made of dreams, but also the people who have made them come true.

Source: How To Read Literature

Some Similar Quotes
  1. You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. - Dr. Seuss
  2. When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable. - Jess C. Scott
  3. I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. <span style="margin:15px;... - Neil Gaiman
  4. We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don't even matter, while all that... - C. Joybell C.
  5. Nothing in this world was more difficult than love. - Unknown
More Quotes By Terry Eagleton
  1. After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
  2. In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big — ironically,...
  3. Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?
  4. [God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.
  5. All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
Related Topics