The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work — the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska. Terry Eagleton
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together. - Colleen Hoover

  2. What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. - Graham Greene

  3. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by... - Oscar Wilde

  4. The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on... - Brent Weeks

  5. Personal experience is the basis of all real literature. - George Henry Lewis

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.

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